Biology and information: a thousand-year revolution

"Here this text comes to an end. In our time, now that the written word has lost the almost sacred status it had for so long, I wonder about its significance. Should I have written it? Or indeed, what place is there for scientific writing? This is a minor work; what benefit can it bring? Choose a major work, such as the 1905 article in which Einstein explicitly sets out the foundations of the theory of relativity, and compare it, with its enormously destructive consequences – do you remember Nagasaki? – with Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with Mickiewicz’s love poetry, or Michelangelo’s Pietà. Ask yourself which you would destroy, if fate allowed you to save only three of these works. Science is, and remains, anonymous. Anyone might rediscover Einstein’s findings, one fine day. Science is anonymous, and this is probably why it is both feared and disdained. What ambition, what mad hope drove me to dedicate my days and nights to thinking through what is set down in black and white in this bundle of pages? Astonishment, no doubt. Astonishment at finding myself one of the billions of human beings taking part in the last doubling of the population of humanity, at a time when we can all look around us at this planet we have devastated. At having witnessed the destruction of all my hopes and all my beliefs, and yet finding myself still standing on this transient earth. At knowing that a day will come, not for me but for others, when a new form of creation will replace what we have destroyed, only to disappear in its turn into the night of Oblivion. I wanted to leave some signs of this new hope of an impossible future, to help those mysterious Others who will one day give it birth, to help them find their way, or rather to know that the way exists, without me. "

The classical physical representation of Reality rests on four currencies: space, time, matter and energy. For some time a fifth property, information, begins to be systematically considered as an essential component of this representation. It appears that the discrepancies between classical physics and quantum physics cannot be resolved by assuming the existence of hidden variables, as all the experiments derived from the thought experiments invented by Einstein and others have all refuted their existence. The contradiction appears to be resolved if one introduces information as an essential component of the phenomena of interest. At least from a heuristic point of view, information can be considered as an authentic currency of Reality.

Information is also central to biology, in a very loose manner in general, essentially via the concept of genetic program and information transfers between the program embodied into nucleic acids and its expression, generally as proteins (which may combine their action to different levels of integration, up to complex behaviours in multicellular organisms for example). In this context of a revolutionary shift of emphasis in the physical sciences, and in the recent developments of biology, we investigate at this site the role of a concept, that has often been considered as quite fuzzy, and which is at the centre of many heated controversies, Natural Selection. If information is a category of Reality, then accumulation of information over time is a central question to biology. Analysis of the genome of living organisms suggests that specific degradation functions make room by using energy to prevent degradation of what is functional. This process of making room is what we used to name natural selection. As information theories are only fairly recent, it is essential to create new ways to represent this category, and the way it permits exploration and creation of novel components of Reality. We hope that this will be an incentive for young mathematicians to display their inventivity. In parallel, this effort needs to be coupled to experimental approaches in biology, to test the many ways in which living organisms trap information: our quest will be to identify Maxwell's demon's genes...