The Early History of Bio-Information

Abstract

In a general sense, the information level of a structure equals the minimum number of instructions needed to specify the structure (Orgel 1973). The presence of a specialized system holding meaningful information (i.e., a genetic system) is essential for the existence of the living state, because any living entity must be capable of establishing, storing and maintaining a representation of its environment – a kind of encoded virtual reality (Lacey et al. 2002). This only refers to structures capable of containing information about themselves. Before competition among living forms, life had to face harsh competition with the random tendencies of the world. Therefore, for the early history of life, self-information may not be enough and it may only become meaningful (i.e., resulting in compositional specificity and steady function) if it can be shared among different entities (Yockey 1992, 2000). Consequently, bio-information is much more than mere complexity or a decrease in comparative uncertainty in an environmental context” (Abel 2002).