Information Theory Explains Life and Refutes Plato - Abstract
Shannon founded a science of literal communication, referred to as Information Theory, in 1948. It relies on the following physical model: a source delivers a message, i.e., a sequence of physical symbols, intended to a destination, by means of a channel. Perturbations, exclusively located in the channel, entail errors in identifying certain symbols. Error correcting codes can, within certain limits, correct such errors. Information theory has been very successful in technical matters but is unrecognised elsewhere. It is shown that, due to unavoidable physical perturbations like thermal noise and cosmic rays, the conservation of genomes at the time scale of geology cannot be under- stood without assuming that error correcting codes exist in them. This assumption suffices to explain the main properties of the living world and its evolution. Interpreting according to Brillouin the thermodynamic entropy as measuring a lack of information more- over explains why living things resist the entropy increase promised by the second law of thermodynamics. Still more, the physical nature of the communication process denies Plato’s idealism.