The working analogy is the story of Flatland. Or, if you prefer, the dimensional framework / tesseract explanation offered by Carl Sagan during one of his COSMOS episodes.
The point that information (Shannon, successful communication) is the difference between life and non-life/death in nature was underscored by Wimmer's creating the polio virus in the laboratory.
He began with the information content (genome sequence available even on the internet) which he merely facilitated the communication of via physico-chemical synthesis.