November 7, 2025
Order vs. outrage
He Jiankui PhD Thesis: Spontaneous Emergence of Hierarchy in Biological Systems
Old He Jiankui thesis resurfaces; comments swing from theory to CRISPR drama
TLDR: He Jiankui’s old thesis on “hierarchy” resurfaced, but the comments quickly shifted from theory to his later CRISPR-baby scandal. Debates raged over whether the science shows true self-organization or just outside pressures, while memes and ethics took over the room.
He Jiankui’s 2010 PhD thesis just resurfaced, and the comment section turned into a spectacle faster than you can say “hierarchy.” The paper argues that layered order pops up across life and even in things like the world trade network, touching on proteins, animal body plans, flu prediction, bacterial immunity, and antibody diversity. But the crowd split immediately: skeptics pounced on the word “spontaneous,” saying the examples look driven by outside forces like the economy, not some mystical self-organization. One reader even nitpicked the timestamp with a sassy “(2011)” to remind everyone this is hardly breaking news.
Then the plot twist everyone saw coming: the thread veered into He’s post-thesis infamy as the scientist behind the first edited human embryos. Cue links to Wikipedia and Know Your Meme, and suddenly the academic debate had a tabloid aftertaste. Some tried to keep it about the ideas—one commenter pitched adding chaos and entropy to stress-test the whole “hierarchy” claim—while others argued you can’t separate the thesis from the man. The vibe? Equal parts armchair philosophy, ethics courtroom, and meme parade. Whether you came for modular proteins or moral outrage, the comments were the main event, with hot takes, side-eyes, and popcorn-worthy drama all around.
Key Points
- •The thesis presents evidence that protein-protein and domain-domain interaction networks have grown more modular over evolutionary time, using a compositional age method.
- •Animal developmental genes show hierarchical evolutionary rates: high-level body plan genes evolve slowly, while lower-level trait genes evolve faster.
- •Modularity theory applied to the world trade network predicts increased sensitivity to recessions and slower recovery due to globalization; data show post-recession increases in hierarchy.
- •An approach for early detection of dominant influenza strains identifies clusters around emerging variants before dominance.
- •A population dynamics model explains CRISPR array diversification (leader-proximal more diverse), and high-throughput sequencing reveals correlated naive VDJ repertoires, suggesting regulated mechanisms.