The Information Theory of Life
The polymath Christoph Adami is investigating life’s origins by reimagining living things as self-perpetuating information strings.
Chris Adami on the Michigan State University campus.
November 19, 2015
There are few bigger — or harder — questions to tackle in science than the question of how life arose. We weren’t around when it happened, of course, and apart from the fact that life exists, there’s no evidence to suggest that life can come from anything 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.
Quanta Magazine spoke with Adami about what information theory has to say about the origins of life. An edited and condensed version of the interview follows.
QUANTA MAGAZINE: How does the concept of information help us understand how life works?
CHRISTOPH ADAMI: Information is the currency of life. One definition of information is the ability to make predictions with a likelihood better than chance. That’s what any living organism needs to be able to do, because if you can do that, you’re surviving at a higher rate. [Lower organisms] make predictions that there’s carbon, water and sugar. Higher organisms make predictions about, for example, whether an organism is after you and you want to escape. Our DNA is an encyclopedia about the world we live in and how to survive in it. ...
FREE PDF GRATIS: Quanta Magazine
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NOTA DESTE BLOGGER:
A biologia dos séculos 20 e 21 é uma ciência de informação. A teoria do Design Inteligente é uma teoria de informação complexa especificada...
A biologia dos séculos 20 e 21 é uma ciência de informação. A teoria do Design Inteligente é uma teoria de informação complexa especificada...
Fui, nem sei por que pensando que a nova teoria geral da evolução - a Síntese Evolutiva Ampliada/Estendida não contemplou devidamente a questão da informação. Uma teoria científica natimorta!
