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!
If DNA and RNA are the “message” transmitted by radio wave, the “message” only conveys “information” if it results in an active functional protein.
Proteins are also able to convey “messages” as in the example of Signal Transduction.
Your writing about Prion is an absolute embarrassment, and it was the very first thing I read.
If you are actually interested in conveying a “message” to those able to understand it, it would behoove you to become more knowledgeable about the subject and clean up your language as the things you say make no sense to someone who understands the subject.