Life, the scientists argue, emerges when the universe hits on a way to make exceptionally intricate things.

The book arrives at an opportune time, as assembly theory has attracted both praise and criticism in recent months. Dr. Walker argues that the theory holds the potential to help identify life on other worlds. And it may allow scientists like her to create life from scratch.

“I actually think alien life will be discovered in the lab first,” Dr. Walker said in an interview.

Dr. Walker went to graduate school planning to become a cosmologist, but life soon grabbed her attention. She was struck by how hard it was to explain life with standard physics theories. Gravity and other forces are not enough to produce the self-sustaining complexity of living things.

As a result, scientists still struggled to explain how an assortment of chemicals reacting with each other might give rise to life. Scientists had no way to measure how life-like a group of chemicals were, in the way they might use a thermometer to measure how hot something is. […]

Dr. Cronin focused on the fact that the proteins and the other molecules that make up our bodies do not jump into existence. They have to be assembled step by step from simpler building blocks.

Why do economists get excited about the notion of a carbon tax? Why is that a policy that always comes up as an efficient policy if you’re concerned about climate change? What is the selling point, the elevator pitch, for a carbon tax, generally?

Shuting: That’s an excellent question, I think generally economists are very supportive of a carbon tax as a quote-unquote “stick approach,” as opposed to a carrot, like the expensive provisions, clean energy credits in the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA].

Right now we’re all carrot. We seem to be doing a lot of carrots.

Shuting: Yes, a lot of it, and I think one major reason that stands out is the efficiency argument, that it’s efficiently incentivizing consumers and businesses to find the most flexible and least-costly ways to decarbonize. You just have to determine the price per ton of emissions and you’re pricing emissions directly. It’s up to the businesses to find the easiest and least costly way to decarbonize, as opposed to the clean energy tax credits, in the Inflation Reduction Act. A lot of work needs to be done on the regulator side. It might need to be done sector by sector, the technology types that are used to requalify for certain tax credits, or to look at the performance standards that would incentivize businesses to improve their decarbonizaion efforts. So it’s much more direct than tax credits, than carrots. Also, it can move really fast economy-wide. Compared to the tax credits, you really have to do it sector by sector and be very prescriptive.

With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, a lot of time was spent figuring out which technologies, are they going to favor these technologies, is this tax credit going to be technology-neutral, which lends it to the criticism that, ultimately, you’re having legislators, and staffers, and bureaucrats figuring out which are the “good” technologies, which are the “bad” technologies, where, under this system, it’s “may the most efficient technological fix win.”

Shuting: You hit a really, really important point, Jim. The technology-neutral is a key part of why a lot of economists are so fond of a carbon tax, as opposed to tax credits, because when you’re pricing per ton of emissions directly, regardless of the way—it could be hydrogen, it could carbon capture, it could nuclear, as long as you get there, it makes sense for businesses’ long-term investment plan, you can do it; versus the tax credits, it’s basically regulators cherry picking winners and losers, deciding, “Oh, this technology, we think it’s more promising than the other ones.

Serial plea-copper Jenna Ellis has agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors in yet another fake elector case, this one in Arizona. She previously filed a guilty plea and cooperated in the racketeering case in Georgia in which Donald Trump is a co-defendant. Ellis played a major role in advising Trump during his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, right up until the day he left office in 2021.