The scientific significance of information reaches the pages of the Guardian

Paul Davies writing in the Guardian today:

A fundamental reason why the transition from chemistry to biology is baffling is that chemistry is cast in the language of molecular shapes, reaction rates and energy barriers. Biologists use terms such as signals, codes, transcription and translation: the language of information. To a chemist, DNA is a molecule with a specific structure; to a biologist it is a coded database of instructions. To use computer jargon, chemistry tells us about the hardware of life, but biology also needs software.

Although the central role that information plays in life has been appreciated at least since Crick and James Watson elucidated the structure of DNA, little attention has been given to life as an information-processing system.

[...]

Understanding the rules of information management, including any recurring themes or motifs, could presage the next great leap forward in biology.

[...]

A soup of chemicals may spontaneously form a reaction network, but what does it take for such a molecular muddle to begin coherently organising information flow and storage? Rather than looking to biology or chemistry, we can perhaps dream that advances in the mathematics of information theory hold the key.

Can computers help us read the mind of nature? Guardian, 26 August 2015

Our symbolic culture

Humans today live in what we call a symbolic culture. All the objects around us have a symbolic dimension. The clothes we wear, for instance, send out signals about us that are unrelated to their practical function. We form symbolic relationships where no biological relationship exists, with a husband, sister-in-law, godchild, blood-brother, for example. Language, of course, is another key example, the relationship between the words and the objects and concepts to which they refer is completely arbitrary and that is the essence of a symbol.

Neanderthals created few symbolic artefacts. Before about 50,000 years ago there is very little evidence of any that stand up to scientific scrutiny.

All work and no play: Why Neanderthals were no Picasso - opinion - 27 February 2013 - New Scientist

Of course there is also a symbolic dimension even to the lives of animals. See previous posts about the peacock's tail, and if you argue that growing a tail isn't 'creating' an artefact, what about Bower Birds? And there has been recent research showing that Dolphins call each other by 'name'.

Perhaps the use of symbols is not a distinction between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals, nor even between humans and animals, but characteristic of life. I wonder, could that be in there as the, one of the, defining features of a living organism?

Synthetic life - life as information

"Craig Venter creates synthetic life form" Guardian 20/5/2010

"...we've started with information in the computer, built that software molecule - now over a million letters of a genetic code - put that into a recipient cell and [..] that has converted that cell into a new species"

Cue loads of discussion of the ethics, of course, and in comment in the Guardian, Andrew Brown says:

But at this moment of complete victory for materialism something odd has happened: the chemical and material world turns out to be entirely shaped by something called "information".

Absolutely!

But, then he goes on to say

But though this information clearly exists in some sense, it's impossible to say what kind of thing it is, because it isn't a thing at all.

OK, sort of.

Whatever this may be, it isn't material, and it isn't bound by physical laws. Information turns out to be as elusive and as omnipresent as God once was.

Well, information is elusive and omnipresent - which is the motivation for this blog - but I don't know about 'isn't bound by physical laws'.