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"PROGRESSIVE NOTIONS of natural philosophy and theology were simmering in Victorian England when, in 1844, the scientific establishment was rocked by the anonymous publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chambers [1844]). This best-selling book presented, in a highly accessible format, then-radical ideas on cosmic and biological evolution." https://lnkd.in/e5Q9TsW View in LinkedIn

LIFE REDEFINED. "We postulate that it is the transition to context-dependent causation—mediated by the onset of information control—that is the key defining characteristic of life." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

CAUSAL EFFICACY. "To be explicit, biological information is distinctive because it possesses a type of causal efficacy —it is the information that determines the current state and hence the dynamics (and therefore also the future state(s)." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION AS A PROPERTY. "The central position of information in biology is not itself especially new or radical. What is often sidestepped, however, is the fact that in biological systems information is not merely a way to label states, but a property of the system." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

ACTIONS NOT STRUCTURE. "It is the functionality of the expressed RNAs and proteins—not the bits—that is biologically important." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

JUST A MOLECULE. "The biologically relevant information stored in DNA therefore has very little to do with its specific chemical nature (beyond the fact that it is a digital linear polymer). The genetic material could just as easily be a different variety of nucleic acid (or a different molecule altogether), as recently experimentally confirmed." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

"DNA IS NOT A BLUEPRINT for an organism: no information is actively processed by DNA alone. Rather, DNA is a (mostly) passive repository for transcription of stored data into RNA, some (but by no means all) of which goes on to be translated into proteins." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

ANALOG RATIOS. "The heritable information in this case typically consists of the compositional ratios of the molecules in the organized assemblies." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

"METABOLISM-FIRST’ scenarios for the origin of life fall within this analogue framework, positing that early life was based on autocatalytic metabolic cycles that would have been constructed in a manner akin to how analogue computer systems are cabled together to execute a specific problem-solving task." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn

EVERY FIBER. "We have argued that living and non-living matter differ fundamentally in the way information is organized and flows through the system: biological systems are distinctive because information manipulates the matter it is instantiated in." http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869.short View in LinkedIn