Evolution and the Emergence of Biological Information

Kueppers, Bernd-Olaf

The origin and evolution of biological information have both a syntactic and a semantic aspect. The syntactic aspect is in principle a matter of statistics, insofar as the origin of biological information implies that only few structures out of a nearly unlimited number of physically equivalent alternatives carry meaningful information and become selected. The theory of the selective self-organisation of matter offers convincing solutions for the statistical issue.

However, the semantic aspect of information presents a much more difficult problem, inasmuch this aspect refers to the actual information content, expressed in multitudinous ways through the functionality of living systems. The semantics are not deducible from the mere structure (that is, the syntax) of the biological information carrier; they appear rather to give rise to their own conceptual level, one that seems to be irreducible and to be inaccessible to investigation by the methods of the natural sciences.

This paper shows a path that may lead, in spite of the apparently unbridgeable gap between syntax and semantics, to precise statements about the semantic aspect of information. The concept that allows the syntactic and semantic levels to be related to one another is the algorithmic complexity of information. The inclusion of the semantic aspect of biological information in the theory of evolution is likely to have far-reaching consequences for the theoretical foundation of biology.