I had heard the name George Gilder but didn't know much about him. National Review has a good reputation but I don't read it all that much. This sort of article is why they do have such a good reputation. This was a quality commentary and very impressive.
The sort of thing Gilder wrote about very much reflects to "bioinformatic fervor" you mentioned, DanDenDar. In some ways Gilder's article was all about that. The article was quite forward looking with a good understanding of the history or scientific revolutions -- specifically the newtonian to Einstein/Quantum modern understanding of physics.
More nonsense... No possible knowledge of the computer’s materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. Where does he think the 1s and 0s or computation reside? Everything in the computations resides in the computer's materials, and with an old fashioned logic probe you can read them.
The failure of purely physical theories to describe or explain information...
...is Gilder's phrase, and it is as silly as saying that physics doesn't explain the fact that 2+2=4. Of course not. Physics does not explain mathematics.
If it is determined, it is predictable and thus by definition not information.
The digits of pi are determined. Is the string of Pi's digits in base 10 not information in the Shannon sense?
Going on...Gilder claims that information cannot be transferred from protein to DNA. But that is exactly what natural selection does. Proteins sequences that enhance the selection of the organisms enhance the propagation of their particular DNA, thus changing the DNA composition of the population.
Calling the atom 'a complex arena of quantum information' is just nonsense. I think Gilder thinks that anything he doesn't understand is 'information', when it's merely true that he doesn't understand information. The statement
This information processing in one human body for just one function exceeds by some 25 percent the total computing power of all the world’s 200 million personal computers produced every year....is numerically illiterate, in that operations cannot be compared with operations per second (power).
synthesis of protein molecules from a code, and then the exquisitely accurate folding of the proteins into the precise shape needed to fit them together in functional systems. This process of protein synthesis and “plectics” cannot even in principle be modeled on a computer. Yet it is essential to the translation of information into life.
Protein synthesis of course can be modeled on a computer - you don't need a computer, for heaven's sake, it's just a simple translation of a triplet code. We are very rapidly getting to the point where we can model protein folding. But the numerical difficulty of a computational process is no measure of its 'information content'. The weather is hard to model, but that doesn't mean raindrops carry information.
Gilder seems to be unaware that Michael Behe's book has been thoroughly debunked, and much of the last part of his article is standard 'God in the gaps' fare - that because we still don't understand some things, what we do understand must be wrong.
All in all, a very silly article, but I was never much of a fan of Gilder's. Non tech types are usually very bad at explaining highly technical ideas, because ultimately, to explain them, you need to understand them. (And since most tech types can't write, we're doomed!)