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From Matter to Life: Information and Causality
Recent advances suggest that the concept of information might hold the key to unravelling the mystery of life's nature and origin. Fresh insights from a broad and authoritative range of articulate and respected experts focus on the transition from matter to life, and hence reconcile the deep conceptual schism between the way we describe physical and biological systems. A unique cross-disciplinary perspective, drawing on expertise from philosophy, biology, chemistry, physics, and cognitive and social sciences, provides a new way to look at the deepest questions of our existence. This book addresses the role of information in life, and how it can make a difference to what we know about the world. Students, researchers, and all those interested in what life is and how it began will gain insights into the nature of life and its origins that touch on nearly every domain of science.
517 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 23, 2017
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September 25, 2019
Maxwell’s Demon of a living cell
The cosmos is like a computer, and the information about matter and energy is processed in this computer to make physical reality. But the idea of “information” makes sense only to a conscious observer according to quantum physics. Classical/relativistic physics affirms that reality exists independent of conscious observers. In recent years, thermodynamics and the information dynamics have refined our understanding of physical reality.
In thermodynamics, entropy is related to a concrete process, but in quantum mechanics, this translates into the ability to measure and manipulate a system based on the information gathered by this measurement. A well-known example is Maxwell’s demon. Like life, Maxwell's imaginary demon seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics. But on careful examination it doesn't, so long as information is treated as a physical resource, an additional fuel.
In this book, physicist Paul Davies applies information as the key to understand life. Simple elements assemble to form molecules and then turn into life. But non-living matter also consists of the same atoms, then how do we explain this conversion? Non-life to life? Life is generally defined by its hallmarks: reproduction, harnessing energy, responding to stimuli, etc. But that doesn’t tell us what life is. We may know all about the complete genome of a mouse, but we don’t know what it is like to be a mouse!
The information flow in genetics is complex. This is illustrated in an experiment that chops the head and tail of a worm and applying electricity, which disrupts the information flow in regrowth. This results in a worm with a head at both ends, and they reproduce with those physical traits, even though they have the same DNA as the original one-headed worm!
Life is marked by a remarkable transformation in the organization of information facilitated by the operation of laws of physics. The cellular dynamics that includes complex biochemical reactions occurring in a concerted manner to support life. Genes, the molecular components of hereditary materials are read, decoded and translated into proteins. Then “life” uses these informational pathways for regulation and functioning of cells. Treating information as a physical quantity formulate "laws of life" that transcend life's physical substrate. This is where non-life is turning into life, but it is the information dynamics and not mere matter to matter transformation!
The authors take a cross-sectional view of quantum physics, chemistry, nanotechnology and information processing considering hardware (physics and chemistry) and software of life (biology). They don’t describe the nature of biological Maxwell Demon nor we can measure any of its physical attributes.
The first two chapters, Introduction; and the "Hard Problem" of Life by Sara Imari Walker and Paul Davies, Chapter 15. Biological Information, Causality, and Specificity - An Intimate Relationship by Karola Stotz and Paul E. Griffiths; Chapter 13. Living through Downward Causation - From Molecules to Ecosystems by Keith D. Farnsworth, George F. R. Ellis, and Luc Jaeger are interesting chapters. A college level physics, and biology would be helpful to appreciate this book.
The cosmos is like a computer, and the information about matter and energy is processed in this computer to make physical reality. But the idea of “information” makes sense only to a conscious observer according to quantum physics. Classical/relativistic physics affirms that reality exists independent of conscious observers. In recent years, thermodynamics and the information dynamics have refined our understanding of physical reality.
In thermodynamics, entropy is related to a concrete process, but in quantum mechanics, this translates into the ability to measure and manipulate a system based on the information gathered by this measurement. A well-known example is Maxwell’s demon. Like life, Maxwell's imaginary demon seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics. But on careful examination it doesn't, so long as information is treated as a physical resource, an additional fuel.
In this book, physicist Paul Davies applies information as the key to understand life. Simple elements assemble to form molecules and then turn into life. But non-living matter also consists of the same atoms, then how do we explain this conversion? Non-life to life? Life is generally defined by its hallmarks: reproduction, harnessing energy, responding to stimuli, etc. But that doesn’t tell us what life is. We may know all about the complete genome of a mouse, but we don’t know what it is like to be a mouse!
The information flow in genetics is complex. This is illustrated in an experiment that chops the head and tail of a worm and applying electricity, which disrupts the information flow in regrowth. This results in a worm with a head at both ends, and they reproduce with those physical traits, even though they have the same DNA as the original one-headed worm!
Life is marked by a remarkable transformation in the organization of information facilitated by the operation of laws of physics. The cellular dynamics that includes complex biochemical reactions occurring in a concerted manner to support life. Genes, the molecular components of hereditary materials are read, decoded and translated into proteins. Then “life” uses these informational pathways for regulation and functioning of cells. Treating information as a physical quantity formulate "laws of life" that transcend life's physical substrate. This is where non-life is turning into life, but it is the information dynamics and not mere matter to matter transformation!
The authors take a cross-sectional view of quantum physics, chemistry, nanotechnology and information processing considering hardware (physics and chemistry) and software of life (biology). They don’t describe the nature of biological Maxwell Demon nor we can measure any of its physical attributes.
The first two chapters, Introduction; and the "Hard Problem" of Life by Sara Imari Walker and Paul Davies, Chapter 15. Biological Information, Causality, and Specificity - An Intimate Relationship by Karola Stotz and Paul E. Griffiths; Chapter 13. Living through Downward Causation - From Molecules to Ecosystems by Keith D. Farnsworth, George F. R. Ellis, and Luc Jaeger are interesting chapters. A college level physics, and biology would be helpful to appreciate this book.
February 13, 2020
Although I can personally do without the philosophy speak when the term dualism is mentioned or when terms like, "The Hard Problem of life" are used, Sara Imari Walker, Paul Davies, and George Ellis have put together an exceptional set of essays that attempt to provide an updated and more complete understanding of the process of evolution. The questions they sought to answer with the inclusion of the essays are:
-What is information?
-Is it mere epiphenomenon or does it have causal purchase?
-(answering this particular question needs a lot more work. I think we can talk about the potential universal laws that govern emergence without having use these philosophy terms.)-How does it relate to top-down causation?
-Is it conserved, and if so, when?
-How and when does it take on a 'a life of its own' and become 'a thing' in its own right?
-Are there laws of 'information dynamics' analogous to the laws of material dynamics? Are they the same laws? Or can information transcend the laws of mechanics? (the answer is yes)
-How does the information microscale relate to the information of the mesoscale and macroscale (if at all)?
- Is information loss always the same as entropy?
One of the most important criticisms to origin of life research that this book makes is that we don’t really know if the chemistry of life was the same when it first emerged as it is now. The reason why this is so important is that it challenges us to form a definition of first life that does not hinge necessarily on what first life was made of but hinges instead on the process by which many different molecules of life, using different materials, can assemble on Earth or anywhere in the universe.
The researchers in this book are trying to uncover universal laws that might lead to the emergence of life, no matter what material that life is made from and no matter in what part of the universe it might arise.
This is a really big challenge to the RNA world hypotheses because it is very specific and is not looking for general principles.
Instead life is a planetary process in which the individual forms we usually refer to as 'life" are but a part of this whole life process at the planetary scale, and we cannot consider those individuals without considering the process from which they arose and are maintained. That process, and not merely the individuals involved in that process, is "life."
Sara Imari Walker also enjoys challenging the idea that the merging of archaea and bacteria that formed a cell, happened only once, making the emergence of life on Earth a rare occurrence. I LOVE when this assertion is challenged. The First Life research I find most compelling is the study of generation of cells in hydrothermal vent environments, being carried out by Martin, Russell, and Lane. However, one of the things that always bothered me about that work was the intense focus on the single event of one cell engulfing another. I think that is something that may or may not turn out to be true. But, in studying that and making it such a dominant feature of their hypothesis, they really take away from the planetary process that generated the vent conditions in the first place. After all, we don't actually know if the vents are the place at which first life arose, but it seems pretty clear that the thermodynamic processes that create an abundance of free energy are probably how the first cells received the constant and necessary supply of free energy they needed in order to emerge and maintain an active state long enough to reproduce and evolve to eventually become the cells we see today. Cells need energy to catalyze reactions. They need energy to build catalysts. So, focusing on the rare chance occurrence of one cell engulfing another might not, imo, be as useful right now, as figuring out the process that gave rise to life. I always wonder if focusing on the rare chance of occurrence of life indeed hinders the research. I am sure others would disagree.
But to be clear, Imari Walker clearly thinks that non-equlibrium approaches to first life research can only explain so much. For example, in one talk she said, "They could never explain why you and I are having this conversation right now." I have to say I disagree with this. It's very likely that at the end of the day, the math-- eg her work with Davies on scaling at level of underlying chemistry of molecules, level of individuals, and level of whole biosphere or Stuart Kauffman's math looking at the adjacent possible and autocatalytic sets constructed by constraint closure-- is going to show that the process of emergence is governed by the laws of thermodynamics. It is indeed these laws that created the biosphere that continued to work with the individual component life in the biosphere to create the cycles that continue to maintain earth and all living things atop it. Nevertheless, I really like the focus of her current research and highly recommend watching her talks.
Some of the essays I enjoyed most were:
Jillian Smith-Carpenter's essay, which focused on how horizontal gene transfer was like a fluid-like flow of molecular information and that we should think of the evolution of species less like a tree of life and more like a dynamic molecular river.
---------My favorite essay was by Denis Nobel, who was attempting to understand how organisms reproduce themself and has suggested a new way to think about the gene-centric digital view.
Usually I do not enjoy discussions about Descartes, unless they are limited to his role in developing the scientific method, because all too often they involve Cartesian dualism, which suggests that the mind and body are different in that the mind and soul are not physical but the body is physical. The mind is mysterious and epiphenomenal and its parts cannot be reduced to its physical components in the same way the parts of the body (what we would today call molecules) can. But, I have to say that I enjoyed Denis Nobel essay, which quoted Descartes:
If one had a proper knowledge of all the parts of the semen of some species of animal in particular, for example of man, one might be able to deduce the whole form and configuration of each of its members from this alone, by means of entirely mathematical and certain arguments, the complete figure and the conformation of its members. (De la formation du fetus, 1664, para LXVI, p. 146)
Nobel's goal is to "replace the gene-centric digital view of the relation between genotype and phenotype with an integrative view that also recognises the importance of analogue information in organisms and its contribution to inheritance across generations. Nature and nurture must interact. Either on its own can do nothing."
-------
Keith Farnsworth's essay was pretty exciting. We usually think of behavior arising from the interactions of subatomic molecules. Farnsworth attempted to demonstrate "how selection from random processes and information embodiment in molecules, organism systems, and ecological systems combine to emerge with the properties of downward causation and the appearance of autonomy. These phenomena seem to be exclusive to life."
---------Michael Wibral's essay was particularly entertaining and informative. It forces the reader to realize that we are biological systems, and we biological systems have come up with all of the equations with which we understand the world and larger universe. Since biological brains have incomplete knowledge this is challenging but still manage to produce "good enough" solutions quickly, and may therefore serve as a model for AI problems solving.
-What is information?
-Is it mere epiphenomenon or does it have causal purchase?
-(answering this particular question needs a lot more work. I think we can talk about the potential universal laws that govern emergence without having use these philosophy terms.)-How does it relate to top-down causation?
-Is it conserved, and if so, when?
-How and when does it take on a 'a life of its own' and become 'a thing' in its own right?
-Are there laws of 'information dynamics' analogous to the laws of material dynamics? Are they the same laws? Or can information transcend the laws of mechanics? (the answer is yes)
-How does the information microscale relate to the information of the mesoscale and macroscale (if at all)?
- Is information loss always the same as entropy?
One of the most important criticisms to origin of life research that this book makes is that we don’t really know if the chemistry of life was the same when it first emerged as it is now. The reason why this is so important is that it challenges us to form a definition of first life that does not hinge necessarily on what first life was made of but hinges instead on the process by which many different molecules of life, using different materials, can assemble on Earth or anywhere in the universe.
The researchers in this book are trying to uncover universal laws that might lead to the emergence of life, no matter what material that life is made from and no matter in what part of the universe it might arise.
This is a really big challenge to the RNA world hypotheses because it is very specific and is not looking for general principles.
Instead life is a planetary process in which the individual forms we usually refer to as 'life" are but a part of this whole life process at the planetary scale, and we cannot consider those individuals without considering the process from which they arose and are maintained. That process, and not merely the individuals involved in that process, is "life."
Sara Imari Walker also enjoys challenging the idea that the merging of archaea and bacteria that formed a cell, happened only once, making the emergence of life on Earth a rare occurrence. I LOVE when this assertion is challenged. The First Life research I find most compelling is the study of generation of cells in hydrothermal vent environments, being carried out by Martin, Russell, and Lane. However, one of the things that always bothered me about that work was the intense focus on the single event of one cell engulfing another. I think that is something that may or may not turn out to be true. But, in studying that and making it such a dominant feature of their hypothesis, they really take away from the planetary process that generated the vent conditions in the first place. After all, we don't actually know if the vents are the place at which first life arose, but it seems pretty clear that the thermodynamic processes that create an abundance of free energy are probably how the first cells received the constant and necessary supply of free energy they needed in order to emerge and maintain an active state long enough to reproduce and evolve to eventually become the cells we see today. Cells need energy to catalyze reactions. They need energy to build catalysts. So, focusing on the rare chance occurrence of one cell engulfing another might not, imo, be as useful right now, as figuring out the process that gave rise to life. I always wonder if focusing on the rare chance of occurrence of life indeed hinders the research. I am sure others would disagree.
But to be clear, Imari Walker clearly thinks that non-equlibrium approaches to first life research can only explain so much. For example, in one talk she said, "They could never explain why you and I are having this conversation right now." I have to say I disagree with this. It's very likely that at the end of the day, the math-- eg her work with Davies on scaling at level of underlying chemistry of molecules, level of individuals, and level of whole biosphere or Stuart Kauffman's math looking at the adjacent possible and autocatalytic sets constructed by constraint closure-- is going to show that the process of emergence is governed by the laws of thermodynamics. It is indeed these laws that created the biosphere that continued to work with the individual component life in the biosphere to create the cycles that continue to maintain earth and all living things atop it. Nevertheless, I really like the focus of her current research and highly recommend watching her talks.
Some of the essays I enjoyed most were:
Jillian Smith-Carpenter's essay, which focused on how horizontal gene transfer was like a fluid-like flow of molecular information and that we should think of the evolution of species less like a tree of life and more like a dynamic molecular river.
---------My favorite essay was by Denis Nobel, who was attempting to understand how organisms reproduce themself and has suggested a new way to think about the gene-centric digital view.
Usually I do not enjoy discussions about Descartes, unless they are limited to his role in developing the scientific method, because all too often they involve Cartesian dualism, which suggests that the mind and body are different in that the mind and soul are not physical but the body is physical. The mind is mysterious and epiphenomenal and its parts cannot be reduced to its physical components in the same way the parts of the body (what we would today call molecules) can. But, I have to say that I enjoyed Denis Nobel essay, which quoted Descartes:
If one had a proper knowledge of all the parts of the semen of some species of animal in particular, for example of man, one might be able to deduce the whole form and configuration of each of its members from this alone, by means of entirely mathematical and certain arguments, the complete figure and the conformation of its members. (De la formation du fetus, 1664, para LXVI, p. 146)
Nobel's goal is to "replace the gene-centric digital view of the relation between genotype and phenotype with an integrative view that also recognises the importance of analogue information in organisms and its contribution to inheritance across generations. Nature and nurture must interact. Either on its own can do nothing."
-------
Keith Farnsworth's essay was pretty exciting. We usually think of behavior arising from the interactions of subatomic molecules. Farnsworth attempted to demonstrate "how selection from random processes and information embodiment in molecules, organism systems, and ecological systems combine to emerge with the properties of downward causation and the appearance of autonomy. These phenomena seem to be exclusive to life."
---------Michael Wibral's essay was particularly entertaining and informative. It forces the reader to realize that we are biological systems, and we biological systems have come up with all of the equations with which we understand the world and larger universe. Since biological brains have incomplete knowledge this is challenging but still manage to produce "good enough" solutions quickly, and may therefore serve as a model for AI problems solving.
December 8, 2022
Muddled volume that lacks an overall definition of what 'information' actually is. Certain essays claim information to be physical, other not so. I must admit I haven't read all the essays, but I gave up after I read the introduction, the first essay, and six more that interested me the most first. I'm not saying there is nothing of worth here, but overall, it reeks of physical antireductionism.
The first essay 'The "hard problem" of Life' by Walker and Davies can't seem to come to grips with the hard reality of causality and the mystery surrounding the origin of our universe. They basically state that because things are too complex and will never be fully grasped, reductionism as a principle can't be true. As a solution, they propose another mystery, some as yet unnamed & undescribed 'new principle' or new set of natural laws that have to do with information, and which amounts to a variation of vitalism.
It also can't come to grips with the fact that our current physical laws are temporal, and possibly subject to change. They might not have existed as they do now before the Big Bang, or during the very first moments of our universe, so why insist that this is just a fringe opinion?
Lots of stuff is posed as 'established', but upon closer inspection hardly anything is. Just some examples:
- "In the case of consciousness, it seems evident that certain aspects will ultimately defy reductionist explanation, the most important being the phenomenon of qualia - (...)"
- "Our phenomenal experiences are the only aspect of consciousness that appears as though they cannot, even in principle, be reduced to known physical principles."
- "A real living system is neither deterministic nor closed, so an attempt to attribute life and mind to special initial conditions would necessarily involve fixing the entire cosmological initial state to arbitrarily high precision, even supposing it were classical." [This is especially baffling as the authors admit that defining life is hard, and they do not provide a definition of life.]
I also found anthropomorphic talk (biological cells are "autonomous agents"), and too much computer analogies (always a tell of muddled thinking, as if the stuff happening in cells is something more than just chemistry).
Basically a set of essentialist thinking. Consider this quote:
"Even if we do succeed in eventually uncovering a complete mechanistic understanding of the wiring and firing of every neuron in our brain, it might tell us nothing about thoughts, feelings, and what it is like to experience something."
Well, uncovering the complete mechanistic understanding of a certain chemical reaction also tells us nothing about what that reaction experiences. Or uncovering the complete mechanistic blueprint of an iPhone also tells us nothing about what it is like to be an iPhone. It is not because consciousness is a hard problem, that reductionism/mechanism is to be discarded.
Doesn't seem to grasp the chemistry of the cell, even though they admit it is highly complex:
"An example from genomics is an experiment performed at the Craig Venter Institute, where the genome from one species was transplanted to another and "booted up" to convert the host species to the foreign DNA's phenotype - quite literally reprogramming one species into another. Here it seems clear that it is the information content of the genome - the sequence of bits - and not the chemical nature of DNA as such that is (at least in part) "calling the shots.""
My questions are these: are these so called 'bits' anything else than molecules in their environmental context? Is the physical process happening with these molecules anything else than biochemistry? What is this "(at least in part)" piece in the quote? What do they actually mean? The authors reduce questions such as mine to "promissory reductionism" because they say "there is no realistic prospect of ever attaining such a complete material narrative". So when I insist that there is probably (very likely) a material narrative (based on the tremendous descriptive & predictive scientific successes in cell biology, chemistry, physics of the last century) that such is in principle wrong because we as humans aren't smart enough to provide that narrative fully; 100%??
The baffling nature of Walker & Davies reasoning is to be seen in this final quote:
"Expressed more succinctly, if one insists on attributing the pathway from mundane chemistry to life as the outcome of fixed dynamical laws, then (our analysis suggests) those laws must be selected with extraordinary care and precision, which is tantamount to intelligent design: it states that "life" is "written into" the laws of physics ab initio. There is no evidence at all that the actual known laws of physics possess this almost miraculous property. The way to escape from this conundrum - that "you can't get anywhere from here" is clear: we must abandon the notion of fixed laws when it comes to living and conscious systems."
Because our existence is hard to grasp/miraculous, other laws than the ones we know now must be in play? So, non-fixed laws would somehow be non-miraculous? Might it just be possible that extreme coincidence is a factor? No evidence? It's like on Wren's tomb: Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice. Granted, physics hasn't come up with a unified theory yet, but that doesn't mean we should resort to vitalism or discard currently fixed laws or mechanism out of hand. What is a fixed dynamical law by the way? Is it non-dynamical because it is fixed?
And moreover: what ‘laws’ are they talking about? Physical & chemical laws? Because it is clear that biology has no fixed laws – aside the principle of evolution – so if they are talking about biological laws, the last part of statement would amount to stating the obvious and arguing against something hardly any serious biologist argues.
I would advice the authors of the book to read Jan Spitzer's 2021s 'How Molecular Forces and Rotating Planets Create Life: The Emergence and Evolution of Prokaryotic Cellsmy link text' for a better grasp of chemistry and the origin of life question, Alex Rosenberg's 2006s 'Darwinian Reductionism' for a better grasp of reductionism and the reason why laws (except evolution) are absent in biology and Russell Powells 2020s 'Contigency and Convergence: Towards A Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind' for a better grasp of evolution and astrobiological notions of consciousness and life. As for agency & vitalism, there's the 2010 essay 'The Lucration Swerve' by Anthony Cashmore.
More non-fiction & science fiction reviews on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
The first essay 'The "hard problem" of Life' by Walker and Davies can't seem to come to grips with the hard reality of causality and the mystery surrounding the origin of our universe. They basically state that because things are too complex and will never be fully grasped, reductionism as a principle can't be true. As a solution, they propose another mystery, some as yet unnamed & undescribed 'new principle' or new set of natural laws that have to do with information, and which amounts to a variation of vitalism.
It also can't come to grips with the fact that our current physical laws are temporal, and possibly subject to change. They might not have existed as they do now before the Big Bang, or during the very first moments of our universe, so why insist that this is just a fringe opinion?
Lots of stuff is posed as 'established', but upon closer inspection hardly anything is. Just some examples:
- "In the case of consciousness, it seems evident that certain aspects will ultimately defy reductionist explanation, the most important being the phenomenon of qualia - (...)"
- "Our phenomenal experiences are the only aspect of consciousness that appears as though they cannot, even in principle, be reduced to known physical principles."
- "A real living system is neither deterministic nor closed, so an attempt to attribute life and mind to special initial conditions would necessarily involve fixing the entire cosmological initial state to arbitrarily high precision, even supposing it were classical." [This is especially baffling as the authors admit that defining life is hard, and they do not provide a definition of life.]
I also found anthropomorphic talk (biological cells are "autonomous agents"), and too much computer analogies (always a tell of muddled thinking, as if the stuff happening in cells is something more than just chemistry).
Basically a set of essentialist thinking. Consider this quote:
"Even if we do succeed in eventually uncovering a complete mechanistic understanding of the wiring and firing of every neuron in our brain, it might tell us nothing about thoughts, feelings, and what it is like to experience something."
Well, uncovering the complete mechanistic understanding of a certain chemical reaction also tells us nothing about what that reaction experiences. Or uncovering the complete mechanistic blueprint of an iPhone also tells us nothing about what it is like to be an iPhone. It is not because consciousness is a hard problem, that reductionism/mechanism is to be discarded.
Doesn't seem to grasp the chemistry of the cell, even though they admit it is highly complex:
"An example from genomics is an experiment performed at the Craig Venter Institute, where the genome from one species was transplanted to another and "booted up" to convert the host species to the foreign DNA's phenotype - quite literally reprogramming one species into another. Here it seems clear that it is the information content of the genome - the sequence of bits - and not the chemical nature of DNA as such that is (at least in part) "calling the shots.""
My questions are these: are these so called 'bits' anything else than molecules in their environmental context? Is the physical process happening with these molecules anything else than biochemistry? What is this "(at least in part)" piece in the quote? What do they actually mean? The authors reduce questions such as mine to "promissory reductionism" because they say "there is no realistic prospect of ever attaining such a complete material narrative". So when I insist that there is probably (very likely) a material narrative (based on the tremendous descriptive & predictive scientific successes in cell biology, chemistry, physics of the last century) that such is in principle wrong because we as humans aren't smart enough to provide that narrative fully; 100%??
The baffling nature of Walker & Davies reasoning is to be seen in this final quote:
"Expressed more succinctly, if one insists on attributing the pathway from mundane chemistry to life as the outcome of fixed dynamical laws, then (our analysis suggests) those laws must be selected with extraordinary care and precision, which is tantamount to intelligent design: it states that "life" is "written into" the laws of physics ab initio. There is no evidence at all that the actual known laws of physics possess this almost miraculous property. The way to escape from this conundrum - that "you can't get anywhere from here" is clear: we must abandon the notion of fixed laws when it comes to living and conscious systems."
Because our existence is hard to grasp/miraculous, other laws than the ones we know now must be in play? So, non-fixed laws would somehow be non-miraculous? Might it just be possible that extreme coincidence is a factor? No evidence? It's like on Wren's tomb: Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice. Granted, physics hasn't come up with a unified theory yet, but that doesn't mean we should resort to vitalism or discard currently fixed laws or mechanism out of hand. What is a fixed dynamical law by the way? Is it non-dynamical because it is fixed?
And moreover: what ‘laws’ are they talking about? Physical & chemical laws? Because it is clear that biology has no fixed laws – aside the principle of evolution – so if they are talking about biological laws, the last part of statement would amount to stating the obvious and arguing against something hardly any serious biologist argues.
I would advice the authors of the book to read Jan Spitzer's 2021s 'How Molecular Forces and Rotating Planets Create Life: The Emergence and Evolution of Prokaryotic Cellsmy link text' for a better grasp of chemistry and the origin of life question, Alex Rosenberg's 2006s 'Darwinian Reductionism' for a better grasp of reductionism and the reason why laws (except evolution) are absent in biology and Russell Powells 2020s 'Contigency and Convergence: Towards A Cosmic Biology of Body and Mind' for a better grasp of evolution and astrobiological notions of consciousness and life. As for agency & vitalism, there's the 2010 essay 'The Lucration Swerve' by Anthony Cashmore.
More non-fiction & science fiction reviews on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It
December 31, 2020
This book is an excellently curated collection of well written essays by some leaders in the fields of physics, biology and the information sciences. While extremely interesting and informative, these topics require a fair bit of commitment and prior education to really get into and absorb. That said, I feel that these topics are important and profound, not just scientifically, but also from a philosophical perspective. Helping one to contemplate the possible origins of our biological existence and how the interface between computational physics and information theory may help to tell a story which makes sense regarding where life started and how life can be created.
July 25, 2020
It should be clear to any observer that the phenomenon of life poses a prima facie challenge to the dogma of reductionism; dismissive references to dated ideas of an élan vital will not suffice, for living organisms certainly embody information (in some sense) and it is difficult to explicate just what information may be in microphysical terms, let alone adequately to account for its origin in the prehistory of the earth. Shannon’s information theory, while obviously pertinent and often-cited by workers in the field of molecular cell biology, does not by itself resolve the matter, for some physical process has to generate the probabilities that go into his formulae for the information content and conditional information etc. Thus, we have on our hands a lively scientific question, ripe for investigation with all the tools of the latest state of the art in biology, chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy and even philosophy.
The present cross-disciplinary collection of papers, From Matter to Life, calls upon a distinguished board of editors. The two senior members, Paul Davies and George Ellis, are both Templeton prize winners who have, in old age, branched out from their early work in mathematical physics (Davies started out with quantum fields in curved spacetime; Ellis is originally a relativist and cosmologist who coauthored the classic monograph, The Large-Scale Structure of Spacetime, with Stephen Hawking). Davies is now director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, which has a pedigree as long an important hub of theoretical and observational astrophysics and is now looking to compete with more-established places such as the Sante Fe Institute on the burning questions of the origin of life and complexity, which after all have their roots in what goes under the name of astrobiology. This reviewer is less familiar with Ellis’ recent occupations, but apparently, to go by the biographical sketch included in this volume, he has become interested in philosophical issues in cosmology and the emergence of complexity. This reviewer has seen his writings on the controversy over string theory, which are critical of the philosopher of science Richard Dawid’s views on supposed ‘post-empirical confirmation’ of scientific theories. In recent years, Davies in particular has published extensively on questions surrounding biology and the origin of life and has served as mentor to the first editor, Sara Imari Walker. Both come to the field of biology with a training in theoretical physics, which not only colors their approach but also, paradoxically, may be responsible for the originality of their views on mechanism and reductionism. For most professional biologists stand too much in awe of physics to be capable of questioning the materialist doctrine of reductionism, which seems to the undiscerning onlooker to be so well buttressed by the so-called hard sciences. Perhaps it takes the familiarity of the insider, at least one possessing the requisite vision, to be comfortable with entertaining alternatives to the reigning orthodoxy. At least, he (or she, in this case) cannot be accused of not knowing his métier. In any case, Walker has established herself through a number of publications over recent years as one of the leading thinkers in contemporary quantitative biology, who takes a fresh perspective on the key issues and promises much for the future. The interested reader may wish to consult her stand-alone review, ‘Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics’ (arXiv: 1705.08073 [q-bio]) and references therein. After having completed some prestigious postdoctoral fellowships (among them, one at the Nasa astrobiology institute), she now holds an assistant professorship at Arizona State.
The sixteen-page introduction by the editors nicely frames the central problem the authors in this volume address, to understand the nature of information in biological systems and how these differ from inorganic matter. Ever since Galileo and Newton, the time-honored reductionistic approach in physics has been to seek to analyze a physical system at the fundamental level in terms of its initial states and a deterministic and mechanistic law of evolution. Those familiar with the history of science will be aware that, until as late as the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, the reductionistic approach was largely a matter more of ideology rather than of verified results, as far as biology goes. All through the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries, apart from celestial mechanics and some few relatively simple mechanical systems such as the pendulum, the cutting edge of theoretical physics lay more in the elaboration of macroscopic phenomenological laws (Euler’s hydrodynamics, Fourier’s heat equation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Boltzmann’s kinetic theory etc.) than in what could properly be considered mechanistic explanations in terms of microphysical configurations of matter. Indeed, the French school of mathematical physics under the leadership of Poisson, which sought to derive the macroscopic phenomena from microphysics, turned out to be for the most part a failure and was frowned upon by leading lights such as Faraday, Maxwell and Thomson, because its microphysical models were too speculative and unsupported by any experimental evidence (the situation then thus recalls that which we experience today with string theory). Only with the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920’s and its application to quantum chemistry was the foundation laid for a molecular cell biology that could honestly aspire to the reductionistic ideal. Now, astonishingly much has been accomplished along these lines, but, by definition, with life one is presented with a holistic phenomenon that offers a great challenge to the reductionistic paradigm. Even if isolated subcellular processes are increasingly yielding to mechanistic explanation (photosynthesis, enzymatic activity, pumping through ion channels etc.), life at the cellular level, not to mention organismic, remains a very complex phenomenon and it is by no means clear that a strictly mechanistic approach will necessarily succeed. The molecular-biological understanding of cellular processes runs far ahead, especially nowadays with the surfeit of data on genomics, proteomics and metabolomics recently becoming available thanks to modern laboratory techniques. Thus, we enjoy a qualitative comprehension of life’s organization that, so far, does not translate into proven physical mechanisms. The editors are right to surmise that, quite possibly, the concept of information introduces a causal factor that transcends what mechanistic microphysical explanations can ever account for, even in principle. As reviewed by the editors, the contributions to this volume represent a fair sampling of current thinking by workers in the field on the status of the question as to information and causation in biology, who are not beholden to outworn reductionistic dogma.
By far the strongest section in the book is the contribution by Walker and Davies on the hard problem of life, which leads off the collected papers. What is the hard problem of life (on analogy with Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness)? The easy problem consists in coming up with the kinds of mechanistic microphysical explanations we adverted to above, and is progressing apace. The hard problem, for Walker and Davies, is to understand how information can exert a causal effect on life processes. The authors discuss why it is a hard problem in terms of known physics: how to identify universal principles of organization that might not be specific to any given level, given that we have only one realization at our disposal? The need for such principles becomes apparent from a discussion of a toy model of a cellular automaton that aims to show how the number of physically possible realizations of life’s history outstrips the number that can be included under any given class of deterministic laws (in fact, the fraction becomes infinitesimal as the information content of the world diverges). The conclusion drawn from this: the problem of fine tuning is more severe than commonly recognized, for not only the initial state but perhaps also the laws themselves will have to be specified. The authors’ proposed resolution of the hard problem is to posit emergent state-dependent dynamical laws under which information can exert causal efficacy. Hence, life would be in some sense self-referential.
The remaining papers in this part run through the gamut of themes in origin-of-life studies: the rise of information versus entropy, codes, digital versus analogue storage media etc. Chiara Marletto’s constructor theory of life represents an attempt to get beyond the explanatory dead-end of the reigning paradigm, in which the only freedom one has to is rearrange the initial conditions, but, in this reviewer’s judgment, remains much too sketchy, although it can be commended for its intent. Anne-Marie Grisogono discusses the problem of how information emerged initially; she devotes some attention to the question of just what information is, why it is physical, why it matters, what it is about and how life differs from non-life. In their contribution, Jillian Smith-Carpenter et al. go into some detail on the chemical evolution of the peptide code in a chemical network and how it relates to function.
Part two explores the role of replication, noise and hidden information. One might suppose the topic to be important, in view of the importance of junk DNA and post-transcriptional reprocessing by microRNA, such as intron splicing, the function of which has recently become more appreciated and which represent a whole another layer of complexity in the cell’s handling of information. David Krakauer looks at biological systems from the point of view of cryptography; Steven Weinstein and Theodore Pavlic show how noise, or random fluctuations, can be harnessed to play a constructive role in cellular processes, contrary to one’s naïve expectation that noise must be something at best to be overcome, or destructive; David Wolpert et al. treat the problem of state space compression as a trade-off between computational cost and accuracy; and Hector Zenil et al. outline an algorithmic software approach to life, disease and the immune system. The papers in this part, on the whole, are less interesting than those in the first part because it is harder to see how the ideas apply to biology. One has the impression that people who may be expert in their fields are straining to make them relevant to biological systems, not necessarily all that successfully.
Part three on complexity and causality returns to the main themes of this collection of conference proceedings, namely, reductionism, hierarchy, downward causation and complexity. Jessica Flack discusses how new levels of organization may arise and be consolidated when the components of a system perform a collective computation. By integrating out small-scale fluctuations, the system may improve its ability to respond to long-term regularities. Keith Farnsworth et al. turn to the controversial problem of downward causation, in systems ranging from molecules to ecosystems. Certainly, many biological systems give the appearance of autonomous behavior. What is good about their contribution is that it gets into specifics in a number of examples, such as the functional shapes of biopolymers, cellular functioning and embryology. Larissa Albantakis and Giulio Tononi study dynamics and cause-effect structures in cellular automata and seek to draw lessons for living systems. Finally, Karola Stotz and Paul Griffiths probe the intimate relationship between causality and specificity in biological systems, as measured by mutual information. This contribution is perhaps philosophically the most stimulating in the entire volume; the authors’ contention that Francis Crick’s central dogma is really about specificity is very suggestive. To this reviewer, the idea of specificity is key to understanding how information, with its causal aspects, can manifest itself on the microphysical level, and will repay deeper analysis in the future. The papers in part three, thus, are comparatively strong.
The final part on matter to mind is, for this reviewer, the weakest. Simon DeDeo discusses major transitions in political order; Michael Wibral et al. analyze distributed computing in neural systems; and Andrew Briggs and Dawid Potgieter review the status of machine learning and the questions it raises. The problem with these papers is that the toy models introduced are much too simplistic, the discussion remains at much too formal a level (equations unsupported by any numerical examples or analysis) and, as far as machine learning goes, no attempt is made to connect back to the motivating theme of the volume as a whole, namely, the question of information and causation in biology. So-called econophysics is a burgeoning field and this reviewer is aware of much more interesting analyses of high-level social phenomena in terms of an underlying model than appear in the work presently under review, involving, for instance, a characterization of the global phenomenology on the basis of bifurcation theory. Thus, we can fault the present volume as a missed opportunity.
Overall impression: a mix, some contributions much higher in quality than others; presumably, this unfortunate outcome was dictated by the need to include everyone for reasons of academic politics. The contribution by Walker and Davies and some of the other notable papers would deserve four stars, so the three-star rating here represents an average. Second, while many are informative and interesting, these essays are not necessarily the place to learn the subject for the first time, even though they are in the nature of a review. The conference-proceedings format does not allow for a systematic exposition. Some recommended references for those curious to follow up: Eigen and Schuster’s classic series of papers on the hypercycle in the journal Naturwissenschaften from the 1970’s; Maynard Smith and Szathmáry, Major transitions in evolution.
The present cross-disciplinary collection of papers, From Matter to Life, calls upon a distinguished board of editors. The two senior members, Paul Davies and George Ellis, are both Templeton prize winners who have, in old age, branched out from their early work in mathematical physics (Davies started out with quantum fields in curved spacetime; Ellis is originally a relativist and cosmologist who coauthored the classic monograph, The Large-Scale Structure of Spacetime, with Stephen Hawking). Davies is now director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, which has a pedigree as long an important hub of theoretical and observational astrophysics and is now looking to compete with more-established places such as the Sante Fe Institute on the burning questions of the origin of life and complexity, which after all have their roots in what goes under the name of astrobiology. This reviewer is less familiar with Ellis’ recent occupations, but apparently, to go by the biographical sketch included in this volume, he has become interested in philosophical issues in cosmology and the emergence of complexity. This reviewer has seen his writings on the controversy over string theory, which are critical of the philosopher of science Richard Dawid’s views on supposed ‘post-empirical confirmation’ of scientific theories. In recent years, Davies in particular has published extensively on questions surrounding biology and the origin of life and has served as mentor to the first editor, Sara Imari Walker. Both come to the field of biology with a training in theoretical physics, which not only colors their approach but also, paradoxically, may be responsible for the originality of their views on mechanism and reductionism. For most professional biologists stand too much in awe of physics to be capable of questioning the materialist doctrine of reductionism, which seems to the undiscerning onlooker to be so well buttressed by the so-called hard sciences. Perhaps it takes the familiarity of the insider, at least one possessing the requisite vision, to be comfortable with entertaining alternatives to the reigning orthodoxy. At least, he (or she, in this case) cannot be accused of not knowing his métier. In any case, Walker has established herself through a number of publications over recent years as one of the leading thinkers in contemporary quantitative biology, who takes a fresh perspective on the key issues and promises much for the future. The interested reader may wish to consult her stand-alone review, ‘Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics’ (arXiv: 1705.08073 [q-bio]) and references therein. After having completed some prestigious postdoctoral fellowships (among them, one at the Nasa astrobiology institute), she now holds an assistant professorship at Arizona State.
The sixteen-page introduction by the editors nicely frames the central problem the authors in this volume address, to understand the nature of information in biological systems and how these differ from inorganic matter. Ever since Galileo and Newton, the time-honored reductionistic approach in physics has been to seek to analyze a physical system at the fundamental level in terms of its initial states and a deterministic and mechanistic law of evolution. Those familiar with the history of science will be aware that, until as late as the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, the reductionistic approach was largely a matter more of ideology rather than of verified results, as far as biology goes. All through the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries, apart from celestial mechanics and some few relatively simple mechanical systems such as the pendulum, the cutting edge of theoretical physics lay more in the elaboration of macroscopic phenomenological laws (Euler’s hydrodynamics, Fourier’s heat equation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Boltzmann’s kinetic theory etc.) than in what could properly be considered mechanistic explanations in terms of microphysical configurations of matter. Indeed, the French school of mathematical physics under the leadership of Poisson, which sought to derive the macroscopic phenomena from microphysics, turned out to be for the most part a failure and was frowned upon by leading lights such as Faraday, Maxwell and Thomson, because its microphysical models were too speculative and unsupported by any experimental evidence (the situation then thus recalls that which we experience today with string theory). Only with the advent of quantum mechanics in the 1920’s and its application to quantum chemistry was the foundation laid for a molecular cell biology that could honestly aspire to the reductionistic ideal. Now, astonishingly much has been accomplished along these lines, but, by definition, with life one is presented with a holistic phenomenon that offers a great challenge to the reductionistic paradigm. Even if isolated subcellular processes are increasingly yielding to mechanistic explanation (photosynthesis, enzymatic activity, pumping through ion channels etc.), life at the cellular level, not to mention organismic, remains a very complex phenomenon and it is by no means clear that a strictly mechanistic approach will necessarily succeed. The molecular-biological understanding of cellular processes runs far ahead, especially nowadays with the surfeit of data on genomics, proteomics and metabolomics recently becoming available thanks to modern laboratory techniques. Thus, we enjoy a qualitative comprehension of life’s organization that, so far, does not translate into proven physical mechanisms. The editors are right to surmise that, quite possibly, the concept of information introduces a causal factor that transcends what mechanistic microphysical explanations can ever account for, even in principle. As reviewed by the editors, the contributions to this volume represent a fair sampling of current thinking by workers in the field on the status of the question as to information and causation in biology, who are not beholden to outworn reductionistic dogma.
By far the strongest section in the book is the contribution by Walker and Davies on the hard problem of life, which leads off the collected papers. What is the hard problem of life (on analogy with Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness)? The easy problem consists in coming up with the kinds of mechanistic microphysical explanations we adverted to above, and is progressing apace. The hard problem, for Walker and Davies, is to understand how information can exert a causal effect on life processes. The authors discuss why it is a hard problem in terms of known physics: how to identify universal principles of organization that might not be specific to any given level, given that we have only one realization at our disposal? The need for such principles becomes apparent from a discussion of a toy model of a cellular automaton that aims to show how the number of physically possible realizations of life’s history outstrips the number that can be included under any given class of deterministic laws (in fact, the fraction becomes infinitesimal as the information content of the world diverges). The conclusion drawn from this: the problem of fine tuning is more severe than commonly recognized, for not only the initial state but perhaps also the laws themselves will have to be specified. The authors’ proposed resolution of the hard problem is to posit emergent state-dependent dynamical laws under which information can exert causal efficacy. Hence, life would be in some sense self-referential.
The remaining papers in this part run through the gamut of themes in origin-of-life studies: the rise of information versus entropy, codes, digital versus analogue storage media etc. Chiara Marletto’s constructor theory of life represents an attempt to get beyond the explanatory dead-end of the reigning paradigm, in which the only freedom one has to is rearrange the initial conditions, but, in this reviewer’s judgment, remains much too sketchy, although it can be commended for its intent. Anne-Marie Grisogono discusses the problem of how information emerged initially; she devotes some attention to the question of just what information is, why it is physical, why it matters, what it is about and how life differs from non-life. In their contribution, Jillian Smith-Carpenter et al. go into some detail on the chemical evolution of the peptide code in a chemical network and how it relates to function.
Part two explores the role of replication, noise and hidden information. One might suppose the topic to be important, in view of the importance of junk DNA and post-transcriptional reprocessing by microRNA, such as intron splicing, the function of which has recently become more appreciated and which represent a whole another layer of complexity in the cell’s handling of information. David Krakauer looks at biological systems from the point of view of cryptography; Steven Weinstein and Theodore Pavlic show how noise, or random fluctuations, can be harnessed to play a constructive role in cellular processes, contrary to one’s naïve expectation that noise must be something at best to be overcome, or destructive; David Wolpert et al. treat the problem of state space compression as a trade-off between computational cost and accuracy; and Hector Zenil et al. outline an algorithmic software approach to life, disease and the immune system. The papers in this part, on the whole, are less interesting than those in the first part because it is harder to see how the ideas apply to biology. One has the impression that people who may be expert in their fields are straining to make them relevant to biological systems, not necessarily all that successfully.
Part three on complexity and causality returns to the main themes of this collection of conference proceedings, namely, reductionism, hierarchy, downward causation and complexity. Jessica Flack discusses how new levels of organization may arise and be consolidated when the components of a system perform a collective computation. By integrating out small-scale fluctuations, the system may improve its ability to respond to long-term regularities. Keith Farnsworth et al. turn to the controversial problem of downward causation, in systems ranging from molecules to ecosystems. Certainly, many biological systems give the appearance of autonomous behavior. What is good about their contribution is that it gets into specifics in a number of examples, such as the functional shapes of biopolymers, cellular functioning and embryology. Larissa Albantakis and Giulio Tononi study dynamics and cause-effect structures in cellular automata and seek to draw lessons for living systems. Finally, Karola Stotz and Paul Griffiths probe the intimate relationship between causality and specificity in biological systems, as measured by mutual information. This contribution is perhaps philosophically the most stimulating in the entire volume; the authors’ contention that Francis Crick’s central dogma is really about specificity is very suggestive. To this reviewer, the idea of specificity is key to understanding how information, with its causal aspects, can manifest itself on the microphysical level, and will repay deeper analysis in the future. The papers in part three, thus, are comparatively strong.
The final part on matter to mind is, for this reviewer, the weakest. Simon DeDeo discusses major transitions in political order; Michael Wibral et al. analyze distributed computing in neural systems; and Andrew Briggs and Dawid Potgieter review the status of machine learning and the questions it raises. The problem with these papers is that the toy models introduced are much too simplistic, the discussion remains at much too formal a level (equations unsupported by any numerical examples or analysis) and, as far as machine learning goes, no attempt is made to connect back to the motivating theme of the volume as a whole, namely, the question of information and causation in biology. So-called econophysics is a burgeoning field and this reviewer is aware of much more interesting analyses of high-level social phenomena in terms of an underlying model than appear in the work presently under review, involving, for instance, a characterization of the global phenomenology on the basis of bifurcation theory. Thus, we can fault the present volume as a missed opportunity.
Overall impression: a mix, some contributions much higher in quality than others; presumably, this unfortunate outcome was dictated by the need to include everyone for reasons of academic politics. The contribution by Walker and Davies and some of the other notable papers would deserve four stars, so the three-star rating here represents an average. Second, while many are informative and interesting, these essays are not necessarily the place to learn the subject for the first time, even though they are in the nature of a review. The conference-proceedings format does not allow for a systematic exposition. Some recommended references for those curious to follow up: Eigen and Schuster’s classic series of papers on the hypercycle in the journal Naturwissenschaften from the 1970’s; Maynard Smith and Szathmáry, Major transitions in evolution.
September 3, 2019
Some people seem to have purchased this book not knowing that this is a textbook and anthology that is geared toward those with physics and mathematics backgrounds. The writing is highly technical and this is not a mass-market explanation of this concept. For those looking for a general book on the subject, by one of the same authors, you should check out Demon in the Machine also by Paul Davies.
What this work accomplishes is providing a wide variety of context (physics, biology, chemistry, philosophy) for several of the points elucidated in that work while bringing you up to date on certain areas of epigenetics that are not quite mainstream knowledge yet.
The delineation between physical existence and biological "life" is a fascinating area of contemporary science and requires an interdisciplinary approach as the notions of information impacting the development of the aforementioned biological life rely on modern conceptions of physics and biology. Philosophically speaking, the authors are naturalists and the "information" they discuss is a causal agent, operating at the particle/field level. Anyway, as I said, this is a textbook meant for specialists and is about as dense as reading gets, if you want to hear the concept written for the layman, check out Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies.
What this work accomplishes is providing a wide variety of context (physics, biology, chemistry, philosophy) for several of the points elucidated in that work while bringing you up to date on certain areas of epigenetics that are not quite mainstream knowledge yet.
The delineation between physical existence and biological "life" is a fascinating area of contemporary science and requires an interdisciplinary approach as the notions of information impacting the development of the aforementioned biological life rely on modern conceptions of physics and biology. Philosophically speaking, the authors are naturalists and the "information" they discuss is a causal agent, operating at the particle/field level. Anyway, as I said, this is a textbook meant for specialists and is about as dense as reading gets, if you want to hear the concept written for the layman, check out Demon in the Machine by Paul Davies.
July 31, 2019
This book represents an in-depth discussion of whether or not information can be reduced to material components. Recent discussion has suggested that material reality is rooted in information, which therefore is not reducible to particles. The authors, mostly physicists, are determined to show how we might have both information that has causal powers, and causation that can be understood at the level of particle and field interactions. There is no hocus pocus or appeal to the supernatural here. The scientists represent solid philosophical naturalists who are trying to come to grips with one of the more thorny issues in philosophy/physics.
While a lot of material is covered, this book would be a difficult read for those who have not already studied information theory and/or physics, or both. So, not a book I could recommend widely.
While a lot of material is covered, this book would be a difficult read for those who have not already studied information theory and/or physics, or both. So, not a book I could recommend widely.
July 16, 2024
Declaring a 'hard problem of life' and asking how 'information' 'gains causal purchase' over matter is like declaring a 'hard problem of nation-states' and asking how governance 'gains causal purchase' over biochemistry.
February 4, 2025
Reading and rereading this monster of a book has been a 3-year project for me ever since I first saw Walker in interviews. My understanding of the subject continues to mature with each re-read. There is a lot to absorb and it is never boring. I recommend it for anyone looking for an Assembly Theory and Information Theory reader, and the reference pages alone are a treasure trove.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews