In the Beginning was Information

6 Information in Living OrganismsThere is an extreme multiplicity of life forms around us, and evena simple unicellular organism is much more complex and purposefullydesigned than anything that human inventiveness can produce.Matter and energy are basic prerequisites for life, but they cannotbe used to distinguish between living and inanimate systems.The central characteristic of all living beings is the “information”they contain, and this information regulates all life processes andprocreative functions. Transfer of information plays a fundamentalrole in all living organisms. When, for example, insects carrypollen from one flower to another, this is in the first place an informationcarrying process (genetic information is transferred); theactual material employed, is of no concern. Although informationis essential for life, information alone does not at all comprise acomplete description of life.Man is undoubtedly the most complex information processing systemexisting on earth. The total number of bits handled daily in allinformation processing events occurring in the human body, is 3 ×10 24 . This includes all deliberate as well as all involuntary activities,the former comprising the use of language and the informationrequired for controlling voluntary movements, while the latterincludes the control of the internal organs and the hormonal systems.The number of bits being processed daily in the human bodyis more than a million times the total amount of human knowledgestored in all the libraries of the world, which is about 10 18 bits.6.1 Necessary Conditions for LifeThe basic building blocks of living beings are the proteins, whichconsist of only twenty different amino acids. These acids have tobe arranged in a very definite sequence for every protein. There areinconceivably many possible chains consisting of twenty aminoacids in arbitrary sequences. But only some very special sequencesare meaningful in the sense that they provide the proteins whichare required for life functions. These proteins are used by and built88