From Newsgroup: talk.origins

An essay by Adam Frank, behind an Atlantic paywall: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/12/physics-life-reductionism-complexity/685257/

An AI an summary is given below, and a range of related positions.

I share it as another pointer to what I see as a trend in biology of increasing recognition of the role of information, complexity,
multi-layered organisation and causation, etc, and consequent growing challenges for naturalism.

Enjoy.


SUMMARY

"Frank starts with the controversial 2024 Physics Nobel to John Hopfield
and Geoffrey Hinton for work underlying machine learning. That award
really did use concepts from statistical physics in artificial neural networks, although it doesn't itself establish Frank's broader
philosophical case.

His argument then has roughly five stages:

Traditional physics has been reductionist. Explain matter at
progressively smaller scalesrCoatoms, particles, fieldsrCoand in principle everything else follows.

Complex systems expose a limitation of that programme. Knowing the
particles and their laws does not tell you, in any useful explanatory
sense, why superconductors, ecosystems, brains or organisms behave as
they do. Frank invokes Philip Anderson's famous rCLMore is differentrCY argument.

Life is the extreme example. An organism is not simply a persistent
collection of matter. Its constituent molecules are continuously
replaced while the organized pattern persists. Cells build and maintain
the very membranes, regulatory networks and metabolic machinery that
enable them to build and maintain themselves.

Information and agency distinguish life. Organisms do things for
themselves: bacteria seek nutrients, cells preserve homeostasis, animals pursue goals. Biological information therefore seems to have functional
or causal significance rather than merely being Shannon information.
Frank thinks a new rCLphysics of liferCY may therefore become a major field, with implications for abiogenesis, extraterrestrial life, intelligence
and AI.

That is a serious research programme, not fringe science."


POSITIONS

"I could not find a substantial scientific literature consisting of
direct replies specifically to this Atlantic essay. More useful are the positions of prominent researchers addressing exactly the scientific
issue Frank raises.

Philip Anderson rCo substantial support, with an important qualification. Anderson's classic rCLMore Is DifferentrCY supports Frank's central attack
on na|>ve explanatory reductionism. But Anderson nevertheless accepted
that matter at higher levels obeys the underlying physical laws. His
argument was that reduction does not imply that higher-level science can
be constructed from microscopic physics.

Sean Carroll rCo important counterweight. Carroll accepts emergence and autonomous higher-level descriptions but argues strongly against the
inference that biology needs new fundamental microphysics. The
successful effective field theory governing ordinary matter already
covers the relevant energies and interactions. On this view, biology
requires new explanations, not necessarily new laws of nature.

Denis Noble rCo considerably closer to Frank. Noble argues that biological causation genuinely operates across levels and rejects the assumption
that molecular or genetic levels enjoy privileged causal status. His
cardiac modelling gives concrete examples of higher-level constraints determining lower-level behaviour.

Sara Walker and Paul Davies rCo stronger still. Their origin-of-life work proposes that the decisive transition to life involved information
acquiring a distinctive kind of causal control over matter. They
explicitly argue that the origin problem may need to be conceptualised
in terms of information, computation and causal structure rather than chemistry alone.

Walker, Leroy Cronin and colleagues rCo highly ambitious but
controversial. Assembly Theory attempts to make aspects of this
intuition quantitative, treating complex objects in terms of their construction histories and selection. Their Nature paper explicitly says
their framework does not alter physical laws but changes the objects and causal histories being tracked. However, information-theory researchers including Hector Zenil and colleagues have published substantial
technical criticisms arguing that Assembly Theory's claimed novelty and explanatory power are overstated; the Assembly Theory group disputes
those criticisms."

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