Will the assembly theory imbroglio do anything for evolution?

If the impresario P T Barnum was right to say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, then the paper just published in Nature by Sara Walker of Arizona State University, Lee Cronin of the University of Glasgow, and their coworkers has been a runaway success.¹

The paper claims that an idea called assembly theory (AT) ‘explains selection and evolution’. This has drawn a clamour of responses from scientists on social media – many of them offended, some baffled – and prompted unusually vigorous debate in the online ‘comments’ section of the Nature site. Evolutionary biologists in particular have expressed outrage – denouncing the paper as nonsense, and even a Trojan horse for creationism.