In the Beginning was Information

inevitable interactions ... The origin of life can be explained interms of hypotheses describing fully the sequence of events sincethe origin of protobionts, and the fact that all these events could bededuced from physical, chemical and other laws which are validfor material systems.”Manfred Eigen (*1927), a Nobel laureate of Göttingen, discussesquestions about life from the molecular biology view, with as pointof departure the unwarranted postulate that natural laws controlledthe origin of life. In his work on the self-organisation of matter[E1] he uses an impressive array of formulas, but does not riseabove the level of statistical information. This voluminous work isthus useless and does not answer any questions about the origin ofinformation and of life. He writes in [E2, p 55]: “Informationarises from non-information.” This statement is nothing but a confessionof materialism, and it fails the tests required by reality.Franz M. Wuketits defines the target readership of his book [W8]as follows: “... not only biologists and theoretical scientists, but inequal measure scientists and philosophers, and everybody who isinterested in the adventures of contemporary science.” He then presentsa so-called “evolutionary theoretical science”, claiming toinitiate a new Copernican revolution. Up to the present time greatscientific results were obtained by means of observation, measuring,and weighing, as was done for example by Copernicus,Galilei, Newton, Einstein, Born, and Planck. But in his systemWuketits follows the backward route: His point of departure is toassume that evolution is true, so that all natural phenomena have tobe interpreted through these spectacles. He writes in the introductionof his book [W8, p 11 – 12]:“The fundamental truth of biological evolution is accepted beforehand,yes, we assume in advance that the principle of evolution isuniversally valid, that it is just as valid in the pre-organic domainas in the organic, and that it can be extended to the spheres of psychology,sociology, and culture. If we accept that the evolutionaryview also holds for the human mind and cognition, then evolutionaryideas can also be applied to the analysis of those phenomenawhich are usually regarded as belonging to theoretical science. Asa result this view then becomes relatively more important in the100