Even when reading the paper there was very very little meat. It’s conjecture built upon conjecture but very little of it seems to stand on its own for me. It’s another theoretical framework that is nice to write about but doesn’t actually even try to explain much.
Their argument seems to be that there is selection working on everything to increase complexity. Even cursorily there seems to be major problems with such a conjecture. They feel to me like they confuse persistence with drive.
A thing that lasts longer is more likely to be observed by someone born at a random point in time. This is persistence. This doesn’t mean that things try to get to a state where they last longer, particularly not chemical structures!
This reminds me a lot of that assembly theory paper that came out a week or so ago and was (in my opinion deservedly) battered by most reputable evolutionary biologists.
My own classic was fiddling with the nvidia PRIME config to try and get rid of some very mildly irritating screen tearing. No graphics output at all. Now this is fixable of course, but it’s a pig.
And I’d decided to do this 2 hours before an incredibly important progress review meeting for my PhD.
Got it back with about 10 mins to spare and decided just to leave the driver config alone after that.
Bonus round
Also a friend managed to bork his ubuntu 16 laptop by trying to switch from unity to gnome and ending up with sort of neither. That was reinstall territory right there.