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If you are searching for the meaning
of life,
we recommend starting here first
The link above is our introduction to the implications of the new
science of information for the deeper meaning of our lives. Otherwise
please continue on this page and, if you are new to this website,
we recommend the
Overview page next.
About
this website
Here you will find a description of the aims, activities and
theoretical synthesis of the
"Information - Function - Biology" project. You can click in the menu
to the right to navigate the website.
The broad aim is to advance a deep understanding of life and living
which integrates concepts over all scales, all time and all forms of
biological organisation. The key insight enabling this is to see that
living
is an information process,
that living forms are concentrations of information engaged in storing,
communicating, filtering and recombining information. There are several
inspirations for this work, but perhaps the most prominent is the book
by Erwin Schrodinger, which he called “
What is
Life?*”. That is why this website has the
URL "WhatLifeIs.Info".
What
is the
connection between information, function and biology?
By "information" we do not mean information about things, but rather
information embodied and instantiated by the form of things. Most
people are aware that the genetic code is information embodied in
nucleic acid, but we can also interpret the shape of protein molecules
as embodying information. The shape of a molecule fixes the position of
its atoms in space and this is a way to store information. When the
molecule is an enzyme its shape can directly affect the chemical
processes involved in life, not only that but it can change this shape
in response to its chemical environment - a process that signals (just
as the signals on a railway track) new processes, for example in the
cell. In these cases, the information embodied by molecules, or
transferred by molecular signaling, is functional in the sense that it
does something that contributes towards the working of life. At higher
levels of organisation than molecules, we now know that cells send
signals to one-another to coordinate their behaviours (within an organ
of a body, but also among bacteria) and we all know that whole
organisms communicate information to each other (just think of bees and
ants). The geochemical control system that keeps the global ecosystem
near an equilibrium that is conducive to life (the basis of the Gaia
hypothesis) is also fundamentally one of flows of information embodied
in matter; these are at least highly influenced by the living.
Consider this: your body is a community of cells, probably about
4x10^13 of them
{Bianconi
et al 2013}. Only the neural cells live for as long as you do
{Spalding et
al 2005}
(not all of them, though!), so you are not physically the same person
as you were a decade ago. But you are the same in a more 'meaningful'
way. More starkly, each of these cells is made from molecules, which
are all replaced over time-spans much shorter than a human life, so in
material terms you are certainly not what you used to be, but you are
the same person. How can this be? The answer is that the most important
thing about you is preserved through all the replacement of cells and
molecules. What is preserved is a great deal of information and it is
preserved by the living processes that embody it in physical material.
Indeed the moment this preservation of information (by storing and
communicating in chemical structures and networks) ceases, you are no
longer living. To this extent, living is information processing.
So information is everywhere, indeed it can be thought of as the very
basis of existence, and life has concentrated it into fabulous and
fascinating complexity. At least a great deal (and some argue all) of
the information embodied by life is functional, though there is a
debate about what precisely function means. The pages of this website
are full of information about just such debates and show our growing
knowledge and developing understanding of the way information is used
and forms the essence of living, from the molecular, through organismal
to the global scale of ecology.
The
Research Network
The IFB project is an
academic network
aimed at building collaboration and
sharing knowledge and understanding among a wide range of relevant
disciplines.
The participants form a multi-disciplinary consortium coordinated by
Dr
Keith Farnsworth from the Queen's University Belfast. The ideas it
is
based on are packaged into a set of
Themes, each of which
has its own
web pages on this site.
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is just good old fashioned educational stuff written in HTML5 code,
following the original (pre-commercial) values of the WWW.