In the Beginning was Information

4. Oriented towards a recipient: The sequence of symbols must beaddressed to or directed at somebody. (When a letter or a telegram is dispatched,the sender has a very definite recipient in mind; a book has a certainspecific readership; when a bee performs a food dance, importantinformation is conveyed to the other bees in the hive; DNA information istransferred to RNA which then leads to protein synthesis.) Recipient orientationis also involved even when there is a captive audience in additionto the intended recipient (e.g. unintentional listening in to a conversationin a train compartment).Theorem A2: Random letter sequences or sequences produced by statisticalprocesses do not comprise information. Even if the informationcontent could be calculated according to Shannon’s theory, the realnature of information is still ignored.In the historical debate in Oxford in 1860 between Samuel Wilberforce(1805 – 1873) and the Darwinist Thomas H. Huxley (1825 – 1895), thelatter stated that, if monkeys should strum typewriters randomly for a longenough time, then Psalm 23 would emerge sooner or later. Huxley usedthis argument to demonstrate that life could have originated by chance.But this question is easily resolved by means of the information theorems.It follows from the theorems mentioned in Chapter 4 and from TheoremA2 that information is not at all involved. The comparison invoked byHuxley has no bearing on information nor on life. The properties of informationdiscussed in Chapter 5, show that Huxley spoke about randomsequences, but information was not involved in this argument about monkeystyping. It is impossible for information to originate in matter by randomprocesses (see Theorem 1).Questions a) and b) raised above, can now be answered unambiguously:– It is only possible to synthesise, by means of a statistical process, correctsentences obeying the conventions of a given language, if therequired know-how is included beforehand in the data (valid morphemes,syllables, and words) and in the programs. These programsrequire enormous efforts, and it is then even possible to generate sentenceswhich obey the syntactical rules of the language. But even ifsome meaning could be ascribed to a sequence of words obtained inthis way, it can still not be regarded as having “message quality”,because it originated in a random process.– Statistical processes cannot generate real information or real messages.205