The Information Theory of Life

Re: The Information Theory of Life

by Евгений Волков -
Number of replies: 0

READER COMMENTS

  • Polymath Adami has "looked at so many fields of science" and has correctly indicated the underlying importance of information theory, to which he has made important contributions. However, perhaps because the interview was concerned with the origin of life and was edited and condensed, many readers may get the impression that IT is only a few decades old. However, information ideas in biology can be traced back to at least 19th century sources. In the 1870s Ewald Hering in Prague and Samuel Butler in London laid the foundations. Butler's work was later taken up by Richard Semon in Munich, whose writings inspired the young Erwin Schrodinger in the early decades of the 20th century. The emergence of his text – "What is Life" – from Dublin in the 1940s, inspired those who gave us DNA structure and the associated information concepts in "the classic period" of molecular biology. For more please see: Forsdyke, D. R. (2015) History of Psychiatry 26 (3), 270-287.

  • I can accept that life is information but that seems quite different from information being life. It is only special interrelated information which could be categorized as life. It is specifically applicable information which may be life. The dinosaurs demise was not that they did not have information, they did not have applicable information. That a computer is stuffed with information is indisputable but that does not make them alive. Life is a special set of information operating where that information endows it with a set of special capabilities. Different environments require different information sets to be acknowledged as life and on that basis, life is possible on the surface of a star and in many planetary environments now totally discarded as life capable.

  • This guy has a lack of understanding of basic scientific fundamentals. This articled is very laughable full of wholes and vague notions. I expect more out of science in the 21st century!. Hope for better science based articles in the future.

  • "Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information."

    Chemistry is information, the alphabet being the table of elements. Every molecule is a word. Every reaction is a translation from one word to another. The words form sentences in 3 dimensions. Life is just the chemical sentences that yield the story of living things.

    Everything is information.

  • mike moxcey says:

    It's a good approach if you want to solve for information smile I wonder if he has read Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis. The book is the only one that actually tries to define life scientifically, not philosophically. Lovelock was an inventor hired by NASA to build machines to find life on Mars. During his investigation of how life operates, he uncovered several interesting ideas and issues and realized that Mars did not have life on it. That wasn't what NASA contracted him to do however.

  • A stream of information (DNA) is useless without the "machinery" to process it. That part is always conveniently left out from these "spontaneous" theories.

  • willaim c wesley says:

    Dr. James Paul Wesley wrote a book called "Ecophysics" that provides an ecophysical definition of life as an entropy reducing process

  • Viewing life as information is another useful tool in understanding what is life. One criticism of the article that Adami must know is that there is no information for free; information is always conserved.

    As Adami rightly points out in the "origins" example, although the letters may be random, there is a bias increasing its likelihood of coming together because of the different frequency of occurance of the various letters, which follow a power law distribution. This is likely reflected also in the different frequencies of molecules even in a prebiotic environment, making certain organic molecules more likely to form.

    But besides the frequency distribution of letters, there is another mechanism in both language and in biology which increases the chances for certain patterns to occur. It is that complexity is built from simpler subunits. In the case of the word "origins", those subunits could be the individual syllables. A better model would be to separately examine the chances for "or", "i", and "gins" to form, and then to calculate the chances of these units to come together. A similar scenario applies in biology. We should not be calculating the chances of, say, an RNA molecule forming, but only need to calculate the chances of its various subunits forming, and then separately finding the odds of the subunits combining. Finally, there is even a further mechanism which increases the odds of complexity forming. That is the mechanism of catalysts, which greatly speed the combining of subunit components. In the case of "origins" the odds of it forming are probably increased by the rules of grammar. In biology, creation of nearly all molecules is speeded by other molecules, and this catalyst mechanism is likely a legacy of how chemistry and physics also work; I. E. Catalysis is a universal principle.

    One more comment. Indeed the information contained in DNA is reflective of an organisms environment, or more exactly, a reflection of the environments of its ancestors. DNA and our brains and our consciousness are all self similar models of the environment and the universe, honed to reflect the environment through billions of years of evolutionary selection. The universe is something like a fractal, and these elements are all subunits reflective and self similar to the whole. Our brains operate using a model of the external environment contained in our brains. This internal model closely models that external environment because it has been selected for by evolutionary processes, similar to the evolutionary selection applied to the physical parts of organisms as a whole.

  • How can information be an ability?
    One could say "A possessor of information has the ability", but even that is incomprehensible because you might possess the information and not know what to do with it.

  • Many years ago,I read a rather strange book 'The Corrupted Sciences' by Arnold Arnold.
    I cannot remember much of the content now,but do recall that at the end the author claimed to have discovered that the basis of life,the universe and everything was information, which made a deep impression on me.

  • Sounds the same as what Carlos Castaneda had to say many years ago. No one listened than, maybe because of his "mystical" approach to the subject. look up the assemblage point and his works, this is old.

  • pabloheitmeyer says:

    I don't believe that DNA was created on this planet. It and the relationship to RNA is too complex to be accidentally created by chance. I believe it came from somewhere else. Not from a 'god' who made it, but from somewhere else.

  • Alexey Eryomin says:

    "Information ecology" is a science which studies the laws governing the influence of information summary on the formation and functioning of bio‐systems, including that of individuals, human communities and humanity in general and on the health and psychological, physical and social well‐being of the human being; and which undertakes to develop methodologies to improve the information environment. Information ecology – associated with information hygiene.

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