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."

Comments

It's still evolution, and it's still uninteresting

[davide marney]

From the interview:

Q. But where did that first bit of self-referential information come from?

A. We of course know that all life on Earth has enormous amounts of information that comes from evolution, which allows information to grow slowly. Before evolution, you couldn’t have this process. As a consequence, the first piece of information has to have arisen by chance.

I'm sorry, but this answer is nearly incomprehensible. Information "comes from" evolution, which then "allows" it to "grow", but before evolution, you couldn't have any information? That doesn't even make sense. And, before evolution the first "piece" of information rose by "chance"? What does that even mean?

He's still talking about evolution, which a dead-end theory when you're talking about the origins of life, because you can't "evolve" something that doesn't already exist. Duh.

Re:This actually appears to be a legit way of look

[Diss Champ]

I applaud you for being more honest than most about the fact you are willing to let your already reached conclusions influence your feelings about methods of analysis.

Re:Man with hammer

[kubajz]

As a matter of the fact, he is not the first person to think of this. No matter what media you use (biological matter, transistors) information is the same thing whether it is stored in DNA or on an optical drive. It is clear that DNA contains lots of information that you can measure and you can apply the same research tools in many cases that you apply in computer science.

One interesting thing is how the information got into the DNA - was it somehow "collected" from the system over the generations (i.e. it was always present in the system since the Big Bang?) or is information somehow "generated" over time (which is strange, because the process that creates it would probably contain the information in its definition)...

In other words, the questions are definitely interesting, and I think sometimes it is not a bad idea to realize that if you see a nail and have a hammer, you might apply the latter to the former :)