Frankly, stuff like this makes me more skeptical of the ML community. Remember when people thought Brains were just really complicated hydraulic systems?
I actually think that interdisciplinary work like this can shed light into common structures across physics, biology, neuroscience, CS, etc. If anything, I wish there were more attempts to explore the connections between these disciplines.
Might as well be skeptical of the math community because of circle squarers
Really not sure why do you say this. Is it something personal against him? Are you against people exploring weird interdisciplinary topics?
He has tons of publications [1], including co-authorship with people like this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Koonin
Koonin is certainly not a crank, and is a rather well-known interdisciplinary researcher at the intersection of biology and physics.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=nEEFLp0AAAAJ...