It’s good to learn you're interested in information theory. Indeed, information seems to be essential to an understanding biological life, as even Richard Dawkins acknowledges. The problems are (among other things) where does the information “come from,” and how is it utilized by biological systems?
I’ve seen a speculative study, currently in unpublished manuscript form, which attempts to address this issue. I’m not at liberty to say much about it, but could maybe indicate the general train of the investigation by some very general remarks.
Biological systems all have a physical basis. Therefore, the laws of physics and chemistry pertain to them. But it seems that the physical laws are insufficiently “information rich” to account for the type of self-organizing complexity we see in even simple biological systems.
Now as I understand it, algorithmic information is measured by the length of a sequence of symbols that cannot be given by a shorter length of sequence. Further, the complexity that one can obtain with coupled algorithms may be estimated as the product of the complexity of the coupled algorithms. Any algorithm contains only static information. If the coupling is prescribed, and static, the arising complexity will also be finite and numerically determinable.
Now it appears we have dynamic information flux at the deepest level of biological organization. We have to recognize that, say, a human being is a living system constituted by myriads (of virtually astronomical number) of living subcomponents all of which are synergistically cooperating to express the totality of the living system itself. This is, to me, the “information deficit” that has not been explained.
Also consider the fact that the laws of physics have a very low information content, since their algorithmic complexity can be characterized, as Chaitin did in 1977, by a computer program of less than a few thousand characters. In a 2004 personal communication, he writes:
“My paper on physics was never published, only as an IBM report. In it I took: Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s laws, the Schrodinger equation, and Einstein’s field eqns for curved spacetime near a black hole, and solved them numerically, giving “motion-picture” solutions. The programs, which were written in an obsolete computer programming language APL2 at roughly the level of Mathematica, were all about half a page long, which is amazingly simple.”It seems unreasonable to expect that static algorithmic couplings of physico-chemical laws alone account for the generation of the 1022 bits s–1 of biological information flux, which is the estimate of the informational requirement calculated in this study.
It has become standard to imagine that DNA must be the information source. But a major finding of this paper suggests that DNA has the same problem as the physico-chemical laws in that it is not sufficiently information rich to do the job we task it to perform; i.e., to account for the high-order information needed to coordinate everything from the level of cellular reactions to the global “parts-to-whole organizational problem,” as we might call it. The information content of DNA has been estimated in this study as between 109 bits and 1013 bits s–1. It seems clear that still leaves a rather enormous “information deficit” that must be accounted for.
Or as the author puts it: “If DNA itself lacks sufficient informational capability in its sequential information as well as in its thermodynamic capacity for the government of cellular reactions, what is the source of the above found huge biological information?
To me, it’s just such a fascinating problem! This is only a very oversimplified sketch of a current effort to explicate it. I wish I could say more about that effort here; but I have to wait until the book is published first, which I hope may be soon.
Thanks so much for writing, YHAOS!
I think it’s a key to several things, though surely not the only key. Thanks for the update. I very much appreciate it, even though I don’t understand it all.
It was fifteen years ago, or a little more, when I first encountered the term. Along ‘bout the same time as I heard of nanotech. My grasp that both were important was more intuitive than anything else, but I also understood that the Art Bell in them had to be washed out before they would be of any real value. Back then I worked for a living, so those issues, and a number of others, had to go on the back burner. Now, I can spend a little time on them, so your interest and knowledge is a most fortuitous circumstance.
Thanks for your responsiveness and your willingness to share.