http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
(EDIT) The gist: "As the saying goes, there is much here that is new and true, but what is true is not new, and what is new is not true; and some of it is even old and false, or at least utterly unsupported."
I had no idea this review existed, but it captures many of my reactions to the book when I first tried to read it many years ago. I distinctly remember the lack of discussion of previous work, lack of specific citations to the academic literature, and the garbled way in which scientific fields I had some knowledge of were explained. The book seemed to take pains to make it appear as if the author were inventing something the likes of which the world had never seen before.
A "new kind of science", perhaps?
I slogged through about a third of the book and then skimmed the rest. I waited until there was a copy at the library because I knew it was getting poor reviews, and I was glad I had.
That said, I shared Wolfram's amazement at how amazingly complex behaviors emerged from simple sets of rules. And I too pondered how something like DNA combined with a set of simple rules could result in a fully functional human when those rules were repeatedly applied.
But I have yet to deduce any way in which I might reason from simple rules to a coordinated complex system, or to predict the system such rules would produce. In some ways it felt to me like applying Riemann sums to solve an integration and never being able to get past that algorithmic solution to the next step which is Calculus proper.
It is interesting to read from the author's perspective that after 35 years of thinking about it he hasn't come up with any way bridge that gap either.
It's worth noting that the more we learn about DNA, the more it seems that the rules governing gene regulation and expression are anything but simple. [0]
At one point, it was believed that the Human Genome Project would sequence our genome, and from there it would be relatively straightforward to "read" all the genes and figure out how to cure genetic diseases.
Now, twenty-ish years later, that view seems naive.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_expression#Regulation_of_... - for a very brief overview
If you keep following it down, and uncover the rules underneath the rules, then you reach the last irreducible set of rules. And then somehow that understanding will let you deduce something else or something. (that was were I fell off the train, trying to figure out the second part)
The problem is that emergent properties are difficult to predict from lower level analysis, and the complexity is such that it's expensive to rigorously simulate enough of the system to see what you care about seeing.
The incipit "I can only imagine how fortunate you must feel to be reading my review" is, AFAICT, NKS in a nutshell.
Ego-trip indeed. There's little I find more gag inducing than someone discussing their own writing as if it's elevated cannon apart from themselves.
> But with every passing year I feel I understand more about what the book is really about — and why it’s important.
You don't say Mr. Wolfram
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/scientific-credit-...
Apologies for the link quality.