01/31/2013
A POINT TO PONDER
LIFE IS A GAME OF CONNECT THE DOTS, IF YOU DON'T CONNECT ALL THE DOTS OR DON'T CONNECT THEM IN THE RIGHT ORDER YOU NEVER GET THE PICTURE
A POINT TO PONDER
The secret of life won't be cooked up in a chemistry lab
Life's origins may only be explained through a study of its unique management of information
Even the simplest
bacterium is incomparably more complicated than any
chemical brew ever studied. Photograph: Mads Nissen/ Panos Pictures
chemical brew ever studied. Photograph: Mads Nissen/ Panos Pictures
The origin of life is one of the great outstanding mysteries of
science.
How did a non-living mixture of molecules transform themselves into a
living organism? What sort of mechanism might be responsible?
A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin produced a convincing explanation
for how life on Earth evolved from simple microbes to the complexity of the
biosphere today, but he pointedly left out how life got started in the first place.
"One might as well speculate about the origin of matter," he quipped.
But that did not stop generations of scientists from investigating the puzzle.
The problem is, whatever took place happened billions of years ago, and all
traces long ago vanished – indeed, we may never have a blow-by-blow
account of the process. Nevertheless we may still be able to answer the
simpler question of whether life's origin was a freak series of events that
happened only once, or an almost inevitable outcome of intrinsically
life-friendly laws. On that answer hinges the question of whether we are
alone in the universe, or whether our galaxy and others are teeming with life.
Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists.
They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the
first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that
is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity. Even the simplest bacterium
is incomparably more complicated than any chemical brew ever studied.
But a more fundamental obstacle stands in the way of attempts to cook up
life in the chemistry lab. The language of chemistry simply does not mesh
with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react,
whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation.
Informational narratives permeate biology. DNA is described as a genetic
"database", containing "instructions" on how to build an organism. The genetic
"code" has to be "transcribed" and "translated" before it can act. And so on.
If we cast the problem of life's origin in computer jargon, attempts at chemical
synthesis focus exclusively on the hardware – the chemical substrate of life
– but ignore the software – the informational aspect. To explain how life began
we need to understand how its unique management of information came about.
In the 1940s, the mathematician John von Neumann compared life to a
mechanical constructor, and set out the logical structure required for a
self-reproducing automaton to replicate both its hardware and software.
But Von Neumann's analysis remained a theoretical curiosity. Now a new
perspective has emerged from the work of engineers, mathematicians and
computer scientists, studying the way in which information flows through
complex systems such as communication networks with feedback loops, logic
modules and control processes. What is clear from their work is that the dynamics
of information flow displays generic features that are independent of the specific
hardware supporting the information.
Information theory has been extensively applied to biological systems at many
levels from genomes to ecosystems, but rarely to the problem of how life actually
began. Doing so opens up an entirely new perspective on the problem. Rather than
the answer being buried in some baffling chemical transformation, the key to life's
origin lies instead with a transformation in the organisation of information flow.
Sara Walker, a Nasa astrobiologist working at Arizona State University, and I
have proposed that the significant property of biological information is not its
complexity, great though that may be, but the way it is organised hierarchically.
In all physical systems there is a flow of information from the bottom upwards,
in the sense that the components of a system serve to determine how the system
as a whole behaves. Thus if a meteorologist wants to predict the weather, he may
start with local information, such as temperature and air pressure, taken at various
locations, and calculate how the weather system as a whole will move and change.
In living organisms, this pattern of bottom-up information flow mingles with the inverse
- top-down information flow – so that what happens at the local level can depend
on the global environment, as well as vice versa.
To take a simple example; whether a cell expresses a gene can depend on
mechanical stresses or electric fields acting on the whole cell by its environment.
Thus, a change in global information (a pattern of force) at the macroscopic level
translates into a change in local information movement at the microscopic level
(switching on a gene). More generally, a range of signals received from its environment
help to dictate how a cell's DNA is distributed and transcribed. Walker and I propose
that the key transition on the road to life occurred when top-down information flow first predominated. Based on simple mathematical models, we think it may have happened
suddenly, analogously to a heated gas abruptly bursting into flame.
There is a second distinctive way in which life handles information processing. The
language of genes is digital, consisting of discrete bits, cast in the language of a
four-letter alphabet. By contrast, chemical processes are continuous. Continuous variables
can also process information – so-called analogue computers work that way – but less reliably than digital. Whatever chemical system spawned life, it had to feature a transition from analogue to digital.
The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally
from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin,
any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can
execute a program. Our work suggests that the answer will come from taking
information seriously as a physical agency, with its own dynamics and causal
relationships existing alongside those of the matter that embodies it – and that
life's origin can ultimately be explained by importing the language and concepts
of biology into physics and chemistry, rather than the other way round.
How did a non-living mixture of molecules transform themselves into a
living organism? What sort of mechanism might be responsible?
A century and a half ago, Charles Darwin produced a convincing explanation
for how life on Earth evolved from simple microbes to the complexity of the
biosphere today, but he pointedly left out how life got started in the first place.
"One might as well speculate about the origin of matter," he quipped.
But that did not stop generations of scientists from investigating the puzzle.
The problem is, whatever took place happened billions of years ago, and all
traces long ago vanished – indeed, we may never have a blow-by-blow
account of the process. Nevertheless we may still be able to answer the
simpler question of whether life's origin was a freak series of events that
happened only once, or an almost inevitable outcome of intrinsically
life-friendly laws. On that answer hinges the question of whether we are
alone in the universe, or whether our galaxy and others are teeming with life.
Most research into life's murky origin has been carried out by chemists.
They've tried a variety of approaches in their attempts to recreate the
first steps on the road to life, but little progress has been made. Perhaps that
is no surprise, given life's stupendous complexity. Even the simplest bacterium
is incomparably more complicated than any chemical brew ever studied.
But a more fundamental obstacle stands in the way of attempts to cook up
life in the chemistry lab. The language of chemistry simply does not mesh
with that of biology. Chemistry is about substances and how they react,
whereas biology appeals to concepts such as information and organisation.
Informational narratives permeate biology. DNA is described as a genetic
"database", containing "instructions" on how to build an organism. The genetic
"code" has to be "transcribed" and "translated" before it can act. And so on.
If we cast the problem of life's origin in computer jargon, attempts at chemical
synthesis focus exclusively on the hardware – the chemical substrate of life
– but ignore the software – the informational aspect. To explain how life began
we need to understand how its unique management of information came about.
In the 1940s, the mathematician John von Neumann compared life to a
mechanical constructor, and set out the logical structure required for a
self-reproducing automaton to replicate both its hardware and software.
But Von Neumann's analysis remained a theoretical curiosity. Now a new
perspective has emerged from the work of engineers, mathematicians and
computer scientists, studying the way in which information flows through
complex systems such as communication networks with feedback loops, logic
modules and control processes. What is clear from their work is that the dynamics
of information flow displays generic features that are independent of the specific
hardware supporting the information.
Information theory has been extensively applied to biological systems at many
levels from genomes to ecosystems, but rarely to the problem of how life actually
began. Doing so opens up an entirely new perspective on the problem. Rather than
the answer being buried in some baffling chemical transformation, the key to life's
origin lies instead with a transformation in the organisation of information flow.
Sara Walker, a Nasa astrobiologist working at Arizona State University, and I
have proposed that the significant property of biological information is not its
complexity, great though that may be, but the way it is organised hierarchically.
In all physical systems there is a flow of information from the bottom upwards,
in the sense that the components of a system serve to determine how the system
as a whole behaves. Thus if a meteorologist wants to predict the weather, he may
start with local information, such as temperature and air pressure, taken at various
locations, and calculate how the weather system as a whole will move and change.
In living organisms, this pattern of bottom-up information flow mingles with the inverse
- top-down information flow – so that what happens at the local level can depend
on the global environment, as well as vice versa.
To take a simple example; whether a cell expresses a gene can depend on
mechanical stresses or electric fields acting on the whole cell by its environment.
Thus, a change in global information (a pattern of force) at the macroscopic level
translates into a change in local information movement at the microscopic level
(switching on a gene). More generally, a range of signals received from its environment
help to dictate how a cell's DNA is distributed and transcribed. Walker and I propose
that the key transition on the road to life occurred when top-down information flow first predominated. Based on simple mathematical models, we think it may have happened
suddenly, analogously to a heated gas abruptly bursting into flame.
There is a second distinctive way in which life handles information processing. The
language of genes is digital, consisting of discrete bits, cast in the language of a
four-letter alphabet. By contrast, chemical processes are continuous. Continuous variables
can also process information – so-called analogue computers work that way – but less reliably than digital. Whatever chemical system spawned life, it had to feature a transition from analogue to digital.
The way life manages information involves a logical structure that differs fundamentally
from mere complex chemistry. Therefore chemistry alone will not explain life's origin,
any more than a study of silicon, copper and plastic will explain how a computer can
execute a program. Our work suggests that the answer will come from taking
information seriously as a physical agency, with its own dynamics and causal
relationships existing alongside those of the matter that embodies it – and that
life's origin can ultimately be explained by importing the language and concepts
of biology into physics and chemistry, rather than the other way round.
LIFE IS A GAME OF CONNECT THE DOTS, IF YOU DON'T CONNECT ALL THE DOTS OR DON'T CONNECT THEM IN THE RIGHT ORDER YOU NEVER GET THE PICTURE
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