It is data that distinguishes the DNA of the first cellular organism from that of Man's. Both Man and amoeba have DNA, after all, but what distinguishes the DNA from each other is the data.
Maybe you need to be more precise (this seems to be coming up fairly often). What is data? How are you distingusihing the letters in the sky from Shakespeare (beyond the quantity - the sky may not hold enough clouds). Hamlet says "To be". How much data is there - and how do you know? Is it as much as in "Estar", a Spanish infinitive of to be? What about "frewa"? I made that one up, but how could you describe how much data it contains? What if it is in fact Finnish for a very complex and abstract concept like "event horizon"?
My point is that you have not shown how to evaluate how much "data" is in a sentence, much less in a DNA strand or a non-DNA self-replicating peptide chain. For sentences, data is a cultural and linguistic construct. "To be" means nothing to a Nepalese youth who speaks no english - the sounds are empty and the symbols just a scrawl. If you cannot quantify the amount of "data" in your sentence, how can we apply your analogy to chemical compounds?
Likewise, until we have data stored in DNA, we don't have Life. Instead, we just have a chemical compound/structure.
Maybe you better define these too. What is life, here? Cells? Are viruses life? Is a single strand of DNA life? RNA? simple self-cloning peptides? If a cell has no DNA is it "life"?
How did the data get there? That's a very valid question, worthy of a mathematical probability exercise (as this and other related threads indicate).
It's also an interesting question because you can't tell us what data is. If a DNA strand goes ATC, is that data? What about CCG? What if the first is from a planaria and the second from a dog? GATTACA? (That's a lot of data, because it also refers to a mediocre movie.) Is there more data if the DNA is part of the "junk DNA" or less? How do you tell if you don't know what part of the gene it is from? Thus, it seems, just as linguisitic data is context-dependent, genetic "data" may also be context-dependent.
Moreover, you assert that the DNA strings are very data-complex. Why? The have fewer values (4), so each alpha-numeric value (36 possible, more with punctuation and cases) contains more information than 10 bases! Each codon is three bases - is each letter equal to 30 bases? If I were to explain what "to be" means, I might engage in a book-length discussion of the self, autonomy, and philosophy. Hamlet meant life and death. This meaning is all contained in the sentence - is it also data? If it isn't, is there any more data in "to be" than in "frewa"? We can calculate the precise probability / improbability of data forming randomly / naturally / without intelligent aid.
But can you validly apply it to chemistry, and demonstrate that it MEANS anything?
As an example, red blood cells have no nucleus, and, IIRC, no DNA. Are they alive?