How did life begin in our primordial soup? Assembly Theory is a mathematical model to help quantify precisely this. However, shortly after the paper by Cronin et al was published in Nature, assembly theory started getting critiques that it had a noted similarity to compression algorithms such as those in the Lempel-Ziv family developed back in the 1970s. So what's going on? Check out the unlisted ADDENDUM video here: I go into two extra details that got cut from the main video: why the LZ compression Algorithm is actually a compression, and the idea of a context free grammar. DISCLAIMER: In this video my colleague Gourab Ray and I don't intend to resolve the controversy around these topics, nor give a full and complete hearing of the issues. Instead, we hope to help explain a bit about what the controversy is about to a general audience and act as a stepping stone to checking out the paper and its rebuttals yourself. Key References and further reading: 1) Original Paper by Cronin et al: 2) Refutation Paper by Zenil et al: 3) Sean Carroll did a similar computation to Gourab's combinatorical computation about DNA from the beginning of our video: 4) My previous video on Kolmogorov Complexity: 5) For LZ compression: "Grammar Compression, LZ-Encodings, and String Algorithms with Implicit Input" by Wojciech Rytter in Automata, Languages and Programming, 2004. 6) Great book: "Elements of Information Theory", by Thomas and Cover. 0:00 The Controversy 1:07 Combinatorics of DNA paradox 2:57 Assembly Theory Explained 7:52 Lempel Ziv Algorithms 13:01 Entropy 16:19 Kolmogorov Complexity 17:38 Comparing Assembly Theory and Information Theory ♡♡♡SUPPORT THE CHANNEL♡♡♡ ►Support on PATREON: ► CURIOSITY BOX: use CODE drtrefor for 25% off awesome STEM merch boxes ► MATH BOOKS I LOVE (affiliate link): COURSE PLAYLISTS: ►DISCRETE MATH: ►LINEAR ALGEBRA: ►CALCULUS I: ►CALCULUS II: ►MULTIVARIABLE CALCULUS (Calc III): ►VECTOR CALCULUS (Calc IV) ►DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS: ►LAPLACE TRANSFORM: ►GAME THEORY: OTHER PLAYLISTS: ►Cool Math Series: ► Learning Math Series SOCIALS: ►X/Twitter: ►TikTok: @drtrefor ►Instagram (photography based):