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The Information Theory of Life (quantamagazine.org)
An anonymous reader writes with this story about Michigan State University Professor Cristop Adami and his quest to answer how life arose with mathematics. From the Quanta story: "Christoph Adami does not know how life got started, but he knows a lot of other things. His main expertise is in information theory, a branch of applied mathematics developed in the 1940s for understanding information transmissions over a wire. Since then, the field has found wide application, and few researchers have done more in that regard than Adami, who is a professor of physics and astronomy and also microbiology and molecular genetics at Michigan State University. He takes the analytical perspective provided by information theory and transplants it into a great range of disciplines, including microbiology, genetics, physics, astronomy and neuroscience. Lately, he's been using it to pry open a statistical window onto the circumstances that might have existed at the moment life first clicked into place.
To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information. The shift in perspective provides a tidy way in which to begin tackling a messy question. In the following interview, Adami defines information as 'the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance,' and he says we should think of the human genome — or the genome of any organism — as a repository of information about the world gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution. The repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know, such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or self-replicate."
To do this, he begins with a mental leap: Life, he argues, should not be thought of as a chemical event. Instead, it should be thought of as information. The shift in perspective provides a tidy way in which to begin tackling a messy question. In the following interview, Adami defines information as 'the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance,' and he says we should think of the human genome — or the genome of any organism — as a repository of information about the world gathered in small bits over time through the process of evolution. The repository includes information on everything we could possibly need to know, such as how to convert sugar into energy, how to evade a predator on the savannah, and, most critically for evolution, how to reproduce or self-replicate."
Overall,, TFA comes off as a well written piece. However, I do have a bone to pick on the following:
I beg to differ
To paraphrase a famous quote from someone: ...
1. There are things that we know we know
2. There are things that we know we don't know
3. There are things that we don't know we know
and then
4. There are things that we don't know we don't know
It is the item #4 that is the most important of all
For what it's worth, Wikipedia says it is "a branch of applied mathematics, electrical engineering, and computer science". It originated in EE / signal processing, but has broadened since.
It hasn't only broadened, it also became more fundamental. From my CS/machine learning perspective, Information Theory is a branch of probability theory/stochastics and I would call it fundamental mathematics. For example some central theorems in Information Theory are the equivalents of the Central Limit Theorem and the Law of Large Numbers. Then there are concepts like Fisher Information, Kolmogorov Complexity, etc. that are used in numerous application areas. Perhaps there are more people working with applied concepts like computing the capacity of a communications channel, but that doesn't make Information Theory itself an application of anything.
Lila Gatlin was writing about this in the 1960s and 70s.
"Life may be defined operationally as an information processing system—a structural hierarchy of functioning units—that has acquired through evolution the ability to store and process the information necessary for its own accurate reproduction." --Lila Gatlin, Information Theory and the Living System, 1971
I'd like more insight on how Adami's contributions are especially significant (which they may be, but TFA doesn't make that clear). Or is it just that he's a really good spokesman?