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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."
I was part of some lunchtime discussions with Cristoph Adami back when he was still in California. At a time when much of scientific research has devolved into a bureaucratic exercise of meeting publication quotas, he stood out as being genuinely interested in discovering new things. I was in a more junior position but he always seemed interested in my, and everyone else's, thoughts on their own merit.
On the other hand, he did seem to like to tackle the big questions. And that comes with a certain risk of failure. At Michigan State, he is definitely a big fish in a small pond. But perhaps that gives him more freedom to take risks - than if he were at a more prestigious but competitive institution.
Of course he doesn't because he is an atheist. God created life and it will take a long time for this liberal dumbass to figure that out and start using real science.
I am not an atheist, and while I accept that God started it, I don't have a clue as to how God did it.