L = C

Abstract

The biological sciences, as those disciplines most intensely involved in the investigation of living systems, have, since the middle of the aoth century, made great strides comparable with the great discoveries and development achieved in physics in the first half of the aoth century. Nowadays, modern genetics, molecular biochemistry and physiology are developing at such breakneck speed that it has become impossible to keep an overview of what the detailed state of knowledge is even in very narrowly defined fields. Nevertheless—and this fact must amaze every person interested in science—there are not a few basic questions of biology that still remain unanswered to a high degree. No more so than in the difficulties faced in the investigations into the origin of life itself (biogenesis). Although innumerable elemental processes of the phenomenon of life have been explained in the greatest detail, e.g., the basic biochemical relationships and interactions between the nucleic acids which make up the genetic material and the proteins which make up the cell bodies, up till now nobody has managed to work out a completely convincing model of the origin of life. This is expressed by the fact that no-one has not yet succeeded in producing a man-made living system in the laboratory. A somewhat different, but by its close proximity to natural systems perhaps more successful experiment has been recently set up by Peter Schultz at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. He is trying to produce living systems artificially with more than 4 nucleotides and derive proteins from them with more than the 23 amino acids normally used in living organisms (report in Service woo).

We now find ourselves at the fundamental level which leads from chemistry to biology: here a completely new quality emerges which does not exist in the terminological world of physicochemistry, where one speaks of material interaction, of atoms, molecules or crystals, of forms of energy and their transformation. The quality is information.

Manfred Eigen

The Shannon information concept does not say whether a message is meaningful or meaningless, valuable or valueless, i.e., it is not concerned with meaning at all, in other words, the semantics are lacking. It is precisely in the field of biology that this lack is a significant shortcoming.

Hermann Haken and Maria Haken-Krell

(L ... Life,C ... Cognition)