Genome complexity: what genes do and don't do; Davies (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 02, 2019, 19:46 (2092 days ago) @ David Turell

Paul Davies in wracking his brain to explain the ghost in the machine:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jan/26/i-predict-great-revolution-physicists-d...

"Rather than biology, some scientists are now looking to physics for answers, in particular the physics of information. Buried in the rules that shape information lie the secrets of life and perhaps even the reason for our existence.

"That, at least, is the bold proposal from Paul Davies, a prominent physicist who explores the idea in his forthcoming book, The Demon in the Machine.

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“'The basic hypothesis is this,” Davies says. “We have fundamental laws of information that bring life into being from an incoherent mish-mash of chemicals. The remarkable properties we associate with life are not going to come about by accident.”

"The proposal takes some unpacking. Davies believes that the laws of nature as we know them today are insufficient to explain what life is and how it came about. We need to find new laws, he says, or at least new principles, which describe how information courses around living creatures. Those rules may not only nail down what life is, but actively favour its emergence.

"To understand what bothers Davies, consider a hypothetical device: a life meter. Wave it over a sterile rock and the dial stays at zero. Wave it over a purring cat and it swings over to 100. But what if you dunked it in the primordial soup, or held it over a dying person? At what point does complex chemistry become life, and when does life revert to mere matter? Between an atom and an amoeba lies something profound and perplexing.

"Davies suspects that information is the answer because it seems increasingly fundamental to both physics and biology. In recent years, physicists have shown that information is more than the bits and bytes that course through computers. Information can be converted into energy, for example, such that physicists now build little information engines and information-powered refrigerators, if not with the appearance their names suggest.

"Similar machines are found in biology. Constructed from proteins, they chunter away inside living cells where they manipulate information at the nanoscale. “What we’re seeing in the lab is these two worlds colliding in a very practical way,” he says. “The physics is really connecting with the biology and that’s why I think we’re on the verge of this great new revolution.”

"Davies believes that life will turn out to bear telltale patterns of information processing that distinguish it from non-life. Few people would argue that a computer is alive no matter how the ones and zeroes zip around inside it. What Davies suspects is that life exploits, and arises from, particular patterns of information flow.

***

"He concedes: “It is wishful thinking because at this stage I can’t demonstrate it. But if we live in a universe in which the emergence of life is built into it in a fundamental way then we can feel more at home in the universe.

Rob Shelton responds:

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/physicist-rob-sheldon-on-paul-davies-lif...

"Recently, we quoted Paul Davies writing on the information content of life forms in New Scientist, in The Demon in the Machine, to the effect that the really tough question is how life’s hardware can write its own software.

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" If information is a conserved quantity, then the ability to increase the information flow leads to faster and faster complexity. This is a property of feedback-enabled or “bootstrap” systems

***

" Davies is suggesting that the way to pack more information into a smaller volume is effectively to make information hierarchical. It is as if we take a text, compress it with PKZIP, add some more zipped files, and then pack them all in a library file. When we need the information, we read the header in the library file, extract the file that we want, and then unzip it. This packing and zipping can be done again and again, putting libraries inside libraries inside libraries, as much as is needed, so that an incredible video game with great graphics displaying Terabytes of information can be shipped in a file of 1 Gbyte.

" But what Davies perhaps doesn’t recognize is that the header files, the directories must be “above” the information level of the files. Nothing in the zipped file tells you how to extract it.

" So if Davies believes that a hierarchy of information can pack more information in, and possibly explain the incredible information content of biology, then there must be something “outside” or “above” the biology that is responsible for the compression algorithm. That information cannot arise from inside the cell any more than a self-extracting program can exist without the operating system/hardware outside it.

"The only thing Davies hasn’t done is name this attribute.

"Should we suggest a name? How about … intelligent design?

Comment: Material Life runs an immaterial information.