Information is simply a dead end if all the “information” in DNA tells you is how to make functional RNA transcripts, and all the RNA transcript do is control and regulate and code for protein production.
Does this compute to you?
DNA codes for functional proteins. The only “information” in DNA is how when and where and the recipe for a functional protein.
If the protein doesn't contain any message or information then the “information” is a dead end.
Proteins convey information in chain reactions. Check out “Signal transduction” involving (usually) the phsophorylation and inactivation/activation of proteins by phosphorylation information chain reactions.
For example....
A small molecule binds to a cell surface receptor protein. That protein then is activated and posphorylates a protein that holds inactive a transcription factor protein, and that phosphorylation makes it let go the transcription factor. The transcription factor is then free to go into the nucleus and bind to a specific DNA sequence and turn on a specific subset of genes to produce a specific subset of proteins necessary to respond to whatever that original small molecule was telling the cell to do.
If “information” means anything than it is obvious that proteins contain and convey information.
Using radio transmission/reception as a metaphor – the airways have information content as things are being sent and received. But the content of the air is not the message. Likewise, the air does not constitute the communication - communication consists of message, sender, encoding, channel, noise, decoding and receiver. As with prions, things happening in the air (e.g. other pressure waves caused by storms) can foul the success of communications from sender to receiver.
The reason the Wimmer experiment to bootstrap the polio virus in the laboratory succeeded was precisely because he began with the message, e.g. text off the internet.
Conversely, the success of Urey/Miller (circa 1953) in simulating lightning strikes to bootstrap amino acids, whereas it caused quite a stir, went no further than amino acids. Following the air metaphor, they created turbulence not coherence.
They of course did not have the whole story. About the same time, Crick/Watson discovered information in life, i.e. DNA. But neither did they at the time understand the full import of information theory (Shannon, 1948) to molecular biology.
Only recently, circa 2002, in the Wimmer experiment was it made clear.
Wimmer began with the information sequence of RNA which he synthesized to DNA and then synthesized the message from DNA to RNA. When he added the message to a cell free juice, it began transmitting and duplicating.
The bottom line is that information (successful communication) is at the root of life v non-life/death in nature. But of course the evolutionary biologists (Darwin through Urey/Miller) were not aware of this.
Thank you for this delightful sidebar, dear allmendream!