In the Beginning Was Information (11 page)

* Information is not life, but the information in cells is essential for all living beings. Information is a necessary prerequisite for life.

* Life is nonmaterial, and it is not information, but both entities, matter and information, are essential for life.

Because of the philosophical bias, both information and life itself are regarded as purely material phenomena in the evolutionary view. The origin and the nature of life is reduced to physical-chemical causes. In the words of Jean B. de Lamarck (1744–1829), "Life is merely a physical phenomenon. All manifestations of life are based on mechanical, physical, and chemical causes, being properties of organic matter" (
Philosophie Zoologique
, Paris, 1809, Vol. 1, p. 104 f). The German evolutionist Manfred Eigen expressed a similar view [E2, p. 149]: "The logic of life originates in physics and chemistry." His pupil, Bernd-Olaf Küppers, paved the way for molecular Darwinism, but the present author has already responded to this materialistic view [G14, p. 90–92]. All such ideas have in common that biological facts are interwoven with subjective representations which cannot be justified scientifically. The information theorems formulated in this book, should enable the reader to distinguish between truth and folly.

The code systems used for communication in the animal kingdom have not been "invented" by them, but were created fully functional according to Figure 24.

Figure 14: Certain natural laws are valid for each of the three hierarchical levels; the main concern of this book is the information theorems. The meaning of the arrows are: 1. Information requires matter for storage and transmission. 2. Life requires information. 3. Biological life requires matter as necessary medium. Information and matter fall far short in describing life, but life depends on the necessary conditions prevailing at the lower levels.

Chapter
5

Delineation of the Information Concept

The question now arises as to the region in which the derived theorems are valid. Do they only hold for computers, or also above and beyond that in all technological domains? Are living systems included or not?

What is the position with regard to unknown systems which we might like to evaluate? Are there criteria which enable us to determine beforehand whether the theorems may be applied, or whether we have left the domain of validity? We thus require an unambiguous definition.

We have already considered a number of examples which we have tacitly included in the domain, namely a computer program, a book, flag codes, and hieroglyphics. What about the crystalline structure of a metal or a salt, or of a snowflake, all of which become visible under magnification? The starry skies are investigated by means of telescopes and we obtain "information" about the stars in this way. A detective gathers "information" at the scene of a crime and deduces circumstantial evidence from meaningful clues. A paleontologist may observe the mussel-bearing shale in a geological layer. The scientist "studies the book of nature" and obtains new knowledge in this way. New technological regularities are discovered, and, when formulated, they comprise a lot of information. Now which of the above examples belong to our domain?

Every scientific definition of a concept requires precise formulation, as in everyday communications. A definition serves to fix matters, but it also brings limitations. The same holds for the information concept.

To be able to define a domain, we require a peculiar property of information, namely its representational function. Information itself is never the actual object or fact, neither is it a relationship (event or idea), but the encoded symbols merely represent that which is discussed. Symbols of extremely different nature (see paragraph 4.2) play a substitutionary role with regard to reality or a system of thought. Information is always an abstract representation of something quite different. For example, the symbols in today’s newspaper represent an event which happened yesterday; this event is not contemporaneous, moreover, it might have happened in another country and is not at all present where and when the information is transmitted. The genetic letters in a DNA molecule represent the amino acids which will only be constructed at a later stage for subsequent incorporation into a protein molecule. The words appearing in a novel represent persons and their activities.

We can now formulate two fundamental properties of information:

Property 1:
Information is not the thing itself, neither is it a condition, but it is an abstract representation of material realities or conceptual relationships, like problem formulations, ideas, programs, or algorithms. The representation is in a suitable coding system and the realities could be objects, or physical, chemical, or biological conditions. The reality being represented is usually not present at the time and place of the transfer of information, neither can it be observed or measured at that moment.

Property 2:
Information always plays a substitutionary role. The encoding of reality is a mental process.

It is again clear from Property 2 that information cannot be a property of matter; it is always an intellectual construct (see Theorems 1 to 3, paragraph 3.3). An intelligent sender who can abstractly encode reality is required.

Figure 15: Part A is the domain of definition of information (see Definition D5 for an explanation). In this domain, all the laws of nature about information are valid. The domains B and C fall outside of the definition domain. B represents random characters or random numbers and therefore also lies outside.

Both the above salient properties now enable us to delineate the information concept unambiguously. Figure 15 clearly illustrates the domains of information (A) and non-information (B and C). Whenever any reality is observed directly by seeing, hearing, or measuring, then that process falls outside our domain. Whenever a coding system which represents something else is employed, then we are inside our domain A, and then all the mentioned theorems are completely valid as laws of nature. The following basic definition has now been established:

Definition D5:
The domain A of definition of information includes only systems which encode and represent an abstract description of some object or idea as illustrated in Figure 15. This definition is valid in the case of the given examples (book, newspaper, computer program, DNA molecule, or hieroglyphics), which means that these lie inside the described domain. When a reality is observed directly, this substitutionary and abstract function is absent, and examples like a star, a house, a tree, or a snowflake do not belong to our definition of information (Part B). The proposed theorems are as valid as natural laws inside the domain we have just defined.

It should be noted that the DNA molecule with its genetic information lies inside the domain A. We shall see later that this is a true coding system. Three chemical letters comprise the code for a certain amino acid, but the acid itself is not present, neither spatially nor temporally, as required by Property 1; it is not even present elsewhere. The actual acid is only synthesized at a later stage, according to the code which substitutes for it.

The energy law is valid and exists regardless of our knowledge about it. It only became information after it had been discovered and formulated by means of a coding system (everyday language or formulas). Information thus does not exist by itself — it requires cognitive activity to be established.

We can now formulate another information theorem:

Theorem 24:
Information requires a material medium for storage.

If one writes some information with chalk on a blackboard, the chalk is the material carrier. If it is wiped off, the total quantity of chalk is still there, but the information has vanished. In this case, the chalk was a suitable material medium, but the essential aspect was the actual arrangement of the particles of the chalk. This arrangement was definitely not random — it had a mental origin. The same information that was written on the blackboard could also have been written on a magnetic diskette. Certain tracks of the diskette then became magnetized, and also in this case there is a carrier for the information as stated by Theorem 24. The quantity of material involved is appreciably less than for the chalk and blackboard, but the amount of material is not crucial. Moreover, the information is independent of the chemical composition of the storage medium. If large neon letter signs are used for displaying the same information, then the amount of material required is increased by several orders of magnitude.

Chapter 6

Information in Living Organisms

There is an extreme multiplicity of life forms around us, and even a simple unicellular organism is much more complex and purposefully designed than anything that human inventiveness can produce. Matter and energy are basic prerequisites for life, but they cannot be used to distinguish between living and inanimate systems. The central characteristic of all living beings is the "information" they contain, and this information regulates all life processes and procreative functions. Transfer of information plays a fundamental role in all living organisms. When, for example, insects carry pollen from one flower to another, this is in the first place an information-carrying process (genetic information is transferred); the actual material employed is of no concern. Although information is essential for life, information alone does not at all comprise a complete description of life.

Man is undoubtedly the most complex information-processing system existing on earth. The total number of bits handled daily in all information-processing events occurring in the human body is 3 × 10
²⁴
. This includes all deliberate as well as all involuntary activities, the former comprising the use of language and the information required for controlling voluntary movements, while the latter includes the control of the internal organs and the hormonal systems. The number of bits being processed daily in the human body is more than a million times the total amount of human knowledge stored in all the libraries of the world, which is about 10
¹⁸
bits.

6.1 Necessary Conditions for Life

The basic building blocks of living beings are the proteins, which consist of only 20 different amino acids. These acids have to be arranged in a very definite sequence for every protein. There are inconceivably many possible chains consisting of 20 amino acids in arbitrary sequences, but only some very special sequences are meaningful in the sense that they provide the proteins which are required for life functions. These proteins are used by and built into the organism, serving as building materials, reserves, bearers of energy, and working and transport substances. They are the basic substances comprising the material parts of living organisms and they include such important compounds as enzymes, anti-bodies, blood pigments, and hormones. Every organ and every kind of life has its own specific proteins and there are about 50,000 different proteins in the human body, each of which performs important functions. Their structure as well as the relevant "chemical factories" in the cells have to be encoded in such a way that protein synthesis can proceed optimally, combining the correct quantities of the required substances.

The structural formulas of the 20 different amino acids which serve as chemical building blocks for the proteins found in all living beings, appear in the book
In sechs Tagen vom Chaos zum Men-schen
[G10, p. 143]. If a certain specific protein must be manufactured in a cell, then the chemical formula must be communicated to the cell as well as the chemical procedures for its synthesis. The exact sequence of the individual building blocks is extremely important for living organisms, so that the instructions must be in written form. This requires a coding system as well as the necessary equipment which can decode the information and carry out the instructions for the synthesis. The minimal requirements are: