I feel like that is basic evolutionary theory. Maybe I should actually RTFA..

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.

Look at a close up of moss. It looks like a forest.

Further,

Look at cells, just groups of proteins. Look at organs, just groups of cells. Look at organisms. Just groups of organs. Look at societies, just groups of organisms. Each step is constituted of building blocks of another. The universe is a self organizing system of complexity. I've bored my friends with this theory under the influence of THC but I finally feel vindicated.

That's not a distinction generally used by scientists.

Newton's laws of motion and Einstein's theory of special relativity are both sets of equations that describe motion, but they do not explain why gravity obeys an inverse square law, why c is invariant, etc.

In contrast, Gause's law of competitive exclusion and Darwin's theory of natural selection both explain population distributions in nature.

Damn you Boltzmann

INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER

Republicans are anti-science anyway.