Information Theory Places New Limits On Origin of Life

KentuckyFC writes: Most research into the origin of life focuses on the messy business of chemistry, on the nature of self-replicating molecules and on the behavior of autocatalytic reactions. Now one theorist says the properties of information also place important limits on how life must have evolved, without getting bogged down in the biochemical details. The new approach uses information theory to highlight a key property that distinguishes living from non-living systems: their ability to store information and replicate it almost indefinitely. A measure of this how much these systems differ from a state of maximum entropy or thermodynamic equilibrium. The new approach is to create a mathematical model of these informational differences and use it to make predictions about how likely it is to find self-replicating molecules in an artificial life system called Avida. And interestingly, the predictions closely match what researchers have found in practice. The bottom line is that according to information theory, environments favorable to life are unlikely to be unusual.

Comments

Re:Gibbs Free Energy

[blue trane]

What cost does the absorption and re-emission extract from me, every time I use the lens to do the work I want it to do? What am I losing, what am I giving up to get heat of ignition from sunlight?

I had to buy the glass, and there was an energy cost in producing it. But those are one-time expenditures. Once it's made, the cost to light a fire is nothing.

Also, the first law of thermodynamics seems to be violated, as outlined above. U = Q - W. U (internal energy of the system, in this case the magnifying glass) should be negative, since Q (heat added to the system) is very small, and W (work done by the system) is relatively large. But the internal energy of the magnifying glass doesn't go down, if anything it increases slightly because of a temperature increase?