Assembly theory predicts that objects like us can\u2019t arise in isolation \u2014 that some complex objects can only occur in conjunction with others. This makes intuitive sense; the universe could never produce just a single human. To make any humans at all, it had to make a whole bunch of us.<\/p>\n

In accounting for specific, actual entities like humans in general (and you and me in particular), traditional physics is only of so much use. It provides the laws of nature, and assumes that specific outcomes are the result of specific initial conditions. In this view, we must have been somehow encoded in the first moments of the universe. But it surely requires extremely fine-tuned initial conditions to make Homo sapiens<\/em> (let alone you) inevitable.<\/p>\n

Assembly theory, its advocates say, escapes from that kind of overdetermined picture. Here, the initial conditions don\u2019t matter much. Rather, the information needed to make specific objects like us wasn\u2019t there at the outset but accumulates in the unfolding process of cosmic evolution \u2014 it frees us from having to place all that responsibility on an impossibly fine-tuned Big Bang. The information \u201cis in the path,\u201d Walker said, \u201cnot the initial conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n