A quick thread on our @Nature paper on Assembly Theory. https://nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9… 1/10 Assembly theory provides a new framework to understand selection and evolution that integrates physics and biology. It redefines objects not as particles but by their formation histories.

A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more