Information and life

Context

A physicist asks the biologists' question. In February 1943, in a Dublin lecture theatre, Erwin Schrödinger — Nobel laureate, in exile from the Reich — gave three public lectures titled "What Is Life?" The little book that followed (1944) made two predictions from pure physics: heredity must be carried by an "aperiodic crystal" — a molecule regular enough to be stable, irregular enough to store a code-script — and life persists by feeding on "negative entropy," exporting disorder to its surroundings faster than it accumulates inside. Both Watson and Crick later said the book pointed them at the problem; when the double helix arrived in 1953, the aperiodic crystal had a structure, and the genetic code turned out to be literally a code — triplets, redundancy, error tolerance — Shannon's vocabulary written in chemistry a decade after Shannon defined it.

The framing has only deepened. Life, in this unit's lens, is matter that stores, copies, and acts on information, paying the thermodynamic bill by dissipation — Maxwell's demon (info·2) implemented in lipids and proteins, molecule by molecule, in every cell. The modern frontier pushes the lens hard: assembly theory (Walker & Cronin, 2023, Nature) tries to quantify how much selection history an object carries; Friston's free energy principle recasts organisms as self-evidencing prediction machines; England's dissipative adaptation asks whether matter under drive generically organizes toward life-like states.

The health warning. This area attracts brilliant science and brilliant overreach in roughly equal measure — Davies, Friston, Levin, Walker, and Cronin all have genuinely interesting work, and every one of them has been accused of overclaiming by competent peers. The unit's discipline: treat each claim individually, ask what it predicts that its rivals don't, and refuse package deals.

How to read it

Anchor. Paul Davies, The Demon in the Machine, chapters 5–9 — the biology half. Read with critical distance on top-down causation.

Companion (classic). Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (1944). ~90 pages; influenced Watson and Crick; surprisingly current.

Companion. Michael Levin — his TOE and Lex Fridman interviews are the entry points to bioelectric information fields and morphogenesis. Serious, active, contested in good ways.

Companion (frontier, optional). Walker & Cronin's assembly-theory paper plus one skeptical response — science being done in real time.

Companion (heterodox flag). Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life is not fringe; his father's "morphic resonance" is. Don't confuse the two.