Living computers : replicators, information processing, and the evolution of life

Includes bibliographical references and index

1. How to clone oneself?

2. Self-organizing molecules

3. Informed self-organization

4. The simplest life

5. Evolving replicators

6. Life on earth

7. Evolution as a ratchet of information

8. From DNA to language

9. Epilogue: beyond language

"This book explores life as an information processing phenomenon. I posit that life and the recording of information emerged together inextricably linked and that nothing is as central to life, as its ability to record, communicate, and process information. For most of the last several billion years, almost all nonredundant durable information that has existed on Earth has been stored in DNA. As life on Earth was evolving, information in DNA was accumulating, at least at early stages of evolution. A few hundred thousand years ago, human language emerged, and for the first time, large amounts of information started accumulating also outside DNA. The emergence of language triggered evolutionary mechanisms different from, and faster than biological evolution, namely, cultural evolution. Most likely, information is now growing faster in the world's libraries and computer clouds than in the genomes of all species on Earth taken together. The emergence of human language was a transition as remarkable as the emergence of life itself. Despite the existence of language and the new means of information recording and processing it enabled, at the current stage of evolution, the information in DNA is indispensable; without information in DNA all cultural information and life itself would disappear soon. But need life be like this? Or could future civilisations, in thousands or millions of years, possibly colonising planets of distant galaxies, be based on entirely different principles? Will there be another transition in which DNA becomes less central? The book is aimed at everybody interested in science and comfortable with elementary mathematics: high-school students, teachers, engineers, medical doctors, and business managers, among others. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of a wide range of disciplines, from physics, computing, and biology to social sciences and philosophy"--