Information as the source of life (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 18:50 (3286 days ago)

There is more and more comment about information as the basis of life. Thiss guy thinks it came about by chance:-https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151119-life-is-information-adami/-besides prior life. Which presents a quandary.-"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.-"This reconceptualization doesn't by itself resolve the issue of how life got started, but it does provide a framework in which we can start to calculate the odds of life developing in the first place. Adami explains that a precondition for information is the existence of an alphabet, a set of pieces that, when assembled in the right order, expresses something meaningful. No one knows what that alphabet was at the time that inanimate molecules coupled up to produce the first bits of information. Using information theory, though, Adami tries to help chemists think about the distribution of molecules that would have had to be present at the beginning in order to make it even statistically plausible for life to arise by chance.-***
"Life is information stored in a symbolic language. It's self-referential, which is necessary because any piece of information is rare, and the only way you make it stop being rare is by copying the sequence with instructions given within the sequence. The secret of all life is that through the copying process, we take something that is extraordinarily rare and make it extraordinarily abundant.-***-"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."-Comment: It's either chance or design by a mind. ?Third way?