Information and the Origin of Life

by Bernd-Olaf Kuppers

The relationship between law and chance in the early evolution of life is the guiding theme of this provocative study. The author explores modern ideas about the origin of life from the standpoint of philosophy of science, emphasizing the contribution made by information theory. Küppers asserts that all life phenomena are steered by information and that this information is already defined materially in a universal form at the level of the biological macromolecule. The question of the origin of life turns out to be the question of the origin of biological information. Information and the Origin of Life takes up the fundamental problems of whether and, if so, to what extent the origin of semantic information during evolution can be explained as a general phenomenon within the framework of physics and chemistry. The results could have far-reaching consequences for such fields as the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence.

237 pages, Hardcover

First published April 11, 1990