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COMPOSOMES. “The heritable information in this case typically consists of the compositional ratios of the molecules in the organized assemblies. Although it has been suggested that such ‘composomes’ might provide a primitive inheritance mechanism, it is not clear that they are evolvable, since compositional information tends to degrade over successive generations inhibiting the capacity for open-ended evolution.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

ROLE OF UNREDUCED GAMETES. "Several studies have suggested that the majority of polyploidization events in both plants and animals may have resulted from unreduced gamete formation. This phenomenon is widely accepted as an important evolutionary force in both plants and animals." https://lnkd.in/eWhHmsj 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.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this brief venture into the evolution of biological information, which is at the core of life itself. Among its quandaries, and for another time, are the issues around prions and viruses. They contain biological information, but many scientists consider them non-living despite being able to replicate and to evolve. There is always more to learn. View in LinkedIn

ORIGIN OF LIFE. “The emergence of life was probably marked by a transition in information processing capabilities.” http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869 View in LinkedIn

DIGITAL TRANSITION. “Purely analogue life forms could have existed in the past but are not likely to survive over geological timescales without acquiring explicitly digitized informational protocols. Therefore, life forms that ‘go digital’ may be the only systems that survive in the long-run and are thus the only remaining product of the processes that led to life.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION THEORY. “We have presented a framework for understanding the origin of life as a transition in causal structure, and information management and control, whereby information gains causal efficacy over the matter it is instantiated in.” http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/10/79/20120869 View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION FLOW. “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. This leads to a very different, context-dependent, causal narrative—with causal influences running both up and down the hierarchy of structure of biological systems (i.e. from state to dynamical rules and dynamical rules to the state).” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

HALLMARK OF LIFE. “The division of labour implicit in bimolecular life bestows one very obvious and distinctive advantage; it enables the instructions to be physically separated and stored away from the hardware that implements them. The ‘arm's length’ control implicit in this division is exercised via a software channel—encoded transactions using messengers and specialized bilingual agents that identify, and are read by a system that can decode the instructions. Thus, the algorithm inhabits one molecular universe and its products inhabit another. We consider this separation to be one of the hallmarks of life.” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn

NON-TRIVIAL REPLICATORS. “Although modern life is clearly representative of the class of non-trivial self-replicators, the majority of work on the origin of life has focused on the conceptually simpler case of trivial self-replication. This is not without good reason: the origin of translation—mediating what is known of the transition from trivial to non-trivial—is notoriously difficult to pin down, amounting to an algorithmic takeover of information stored in one molecular species (nucleic acids) that becomes operable over another structurally and chemically very different species (peptides).” https://lnkd.in/ewsT9EQ View in LinkedIn