The Ascent of Information by Caleb Scharf

Author:Caleb Scharf [Scharf, Caleb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

There is a smattering of laughter. In many ways this is precisely where ALife has always been: paddling furiously and generating waves of ideas that either crash spectacularly back on you, or wend their way off to other fields of study, while the boat stays where it is. But as the days go by and I listen to the talks and discussions, one thing does become clear: There are features in the nature of information, and the connection between life and information, that might lead directly to an explanation for the dataome and its properties. There are also things about the dataome that might tell us about the nature of life.

One of the current efforts to understand what kind of phenomenon life really is involves understanding the networks that link organisms and information. In this context a network can represent a variety of things; a set of interacting chemical reactions or the interactions of organisms with each other, whether amoebae, insects, humans, or the peptide messaging of bacteriophages.

But how are networks different in living systems compared with those in nonliving systems? If these differences turn out to be systematic, this could be a way to discriminate between life and non-life and get at the secret sauce itself. This is something that Sara Walker is keenly interested in, and is what she and the physicist Paul Davies have called the “informational narrative of living systems.”

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