Current Synthetic and Systems Biology
Open Access

Abstract

Emergence of Information and the Origins of Life a Tentative Physical Model

Jacques Ricard

Life and living systems requires the existence of information. It is no doubt difficult to understand how this information could have spontaneously emerged in the first living cells. In fact spontaneous random association of molecules cannot give birth to information exactly as the random association of letters has a poor probability to generate a word. The idea developed in this paper is that the information required for the building up of the ?primordial cell? does not originate from the association of molecules xi, with p(xi), probability of occurrence, but from the association of xi, molecules possessing conditional probabilities p(xi?yj,yk....). As will be shown in the paper, such a situation implies that molecules of conditional probabilities p(xi?yj,yk....) do not associate randomly but should follow an order defined by the nature of these conditional probabilities. As a conditional information, , is associated with the corresponding conditional probability of occurrence it follows that a sequence of conditional probabilities possesses a global information. Moreover the system can spontaneously generate an information if h(xi?yj,yk....) < h(xi). Hence the global information could have been generated through the ?coupling? of many of these individual mathematical uncertainties. The problem discussed in the present paper is precisely the converse of a transfer of information from a source to a destination in a communication channel, which has been extensively studied but the emergence of new information in a system.