Um. I don't know what to make of this. I feel like I'm missing something.

The author of this article goes on quite a bit about replication and self reproduction, and a purported difficulty in explaining those with "laws that contain no hidden designs," i.e. the laws of physics. But... there is no such difficulty?

If you have a bunch of compounds in a soup, subject to stimuli that cause their random breaking and recombination, and by chance a molecule is produced that happens to interact with others in a way that results in the production of more molecules similar to itself, then soon enough there'll be a lot of those molecules in the soup, isn't this obvious? And the moment one of those copies, again by random chance, happens to feature a change that makes it statistically better at this process of replication, it will dominate the environment, and you have evolution. Give it enough time, and complexity increases from molecules to human beings.

I don't see how this is hard to grasp. In fact, if you are a programmer who's played with genetic algorithms, particularly in a language where code and data are the same thing, like Lisp, then you probably have seen an analogous process unfold before your own eyes: random noise becoming actual executable code, that does useful things, through selection by fitness alone. It just needs time. A lot of time.

So back to this "constructor theory," I guess my problem is that I don't see the point. I'm not saying it's wrong, but rather, how is this not tautological? What do we gain by talking of "constructors," and stating, "everything not forbidden by the laws of physics is possible"? We already know this, it's a truism. What am I missing here?