The Origin of Life from the Perspective of Information
- 1 Department of Psychiatry, Sakamoto Hospital, Higashiosaka, Japan
Abstract
Plato placed great importance on the natural number one. Plato stated that the three properties of Plato’s one are indivisible, invariable, and equal and that an ideal one has no physical properties. If we regard differences among lives as differences among genes and gene products and life as the container of genes, then life has properties similar to Plato’s one. Furthermore, life has properties of multiplying when it survives and disappearing when it dies. These properties of life are prerequisites for natural selection. Natural selection makes DNA become digital information, enabling accurate copies of DNA. Furthermore, DNA bases, essential for survival, become close to Plato’s one by natural selection. In addition, the information content of life must be sufficiently large for death to be irreversible, and the irreversibility of death is a prerequisite for natural selection.
- Adami, C. (2015). What Is Information? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 374, Article ID: 20150230. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2015.0230
- Alberts, B., Johnson, A., Lewis, J., Raff, M., Roberts, K., & Walter, P. (2002). The Maintenance of DNA Sequences: Molecular Biology of the Cell (4th ed., pp. 235-238). Garland Science. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK26881/
- Anderson, J. (2011). A Million Monkeys and Shakespeare. Significance, 8, 190-192. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2011.00533.x
- Avery, J. S. (2022a). Entropy Expressed as Missing Information: Information Theory and Evolution (3rd ed., pp. 133-137). World Scientific Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1142/12668
- Avery, J. S. (2022b). The Information Content of Gibbs Free Energy: Information Theory and Evolution (3rd ed., pp. 138-143). World Scientific Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1142/12668
- Avery, J. S. (2022c). What Is Life? Information Theory and Evolution (3rd ed., pp. 143-148). World Scientific Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1142/12668
- DeLange, R. J., Fambrough, D. M., Smith, E. L., & Bonner, J. (1969). Calf and Pea Histone IV. 3. Complete Amino Acid Sequence of Pea Seedling Histone IV; Comparison with the Homologous Calf Thymus Histone. Journal of Biological Chemistry, 240, 5669-5679. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0021-9258(18)94434-0
- Gibson, D. G., Glass, J. I., Lartigue, C., Noskov, V. N., Chuang, R., Algire, M. A. et al. (2010). Creation of a Bacterial Cell Controlled by a Chemically Synthesized Genome. Science, 329, 52-56. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1190719
- Kimura, M. (1968). Evolutionary Rate at the Molecular Level. Nature, 217, 624-626. https://doi.org/10.1038/217624a0
- Kotani, K. (2017). What Is Number? Open Journal of Philosophy, 7, 116-125. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2017.72008
- Kotani, K. (2019). Life from the Viewpoint of Information. Open Journal of Philosophy, 9, 503-511. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2019.94031
- Lostroh, P. (2019). Molecular and Cellular Biology of Viruses . CRC Press.
- Pelletier, J. F., Sun, L., Wise, K. S., Assad-Garcia, N., Karas, B. J., Deerinck, T. J. et al. (2021). Genetic Requirements for Cell Division in a Genomically Minimal Cell. Cell, 184, 2430-2440.e16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.03.008