Genetic information, physical interpreters and thermodynamics; the material-informatic basis of biosemiosis

TL;DR

This paper explores the origin of life through the lens of thermodynamics, informatics, and self-reproducing automata, emphasizing the material-informatic basis of biosemiosis and the bootstrap process of genetic information and biochemical machines.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical framework linking thermodynamics and informatics to explain the emergence of genetic coding and biosemiosis in the origin of life.

Findings

Genetic information is meaningful only relative to biochemical interpreters.

The origin of life involves a bootstrap process of simultaneous genetic information accumulation and machine generation.

Conditions for sustaining biosemiosis are discussed within thermodynamic and informatic principles.

Abstract

The sequence of nucleotide bases occurring in an organism's DNA is often regarded as a codescript for its construction. However, information in a DNA sequence can only be regarded as a codescript relative to an operational biochemical machine, which the information constrains in such a way as to direct the process of construction. In reality, any biochemical machine for which a DNA codescript is efficacious is itself produced through the mechanical interpretation of an identical or very similar codescript. In these terms the origin of life can be described as a bootstrap process involving the simultaneous accumulation of genetic information and the generation of a machine that interprets it as instructions for its own construction. This problem is discussed within the theoretical frameworks of thermodynamics, informatics and self-reproducing automata, paying special attention to the physico-chemical origin of genetic coding and the conditions, both thermodynamic and informatic, which a system must fulfil in order for it to sustain semiosis. The origin of life is equated with biosemiosis