Tasmania, or Physics out of Biology

On a recent trip to Tasmania, I visited a tree farm.  The thousands of trees they planted every week were all identical clones.  From a single cell of what was hoped to be a super tree, additional cells are grown in a tissue culture, and after a series of steps they have a forest of clones.  It is one thing to contemplate the wonder that a little seed can carry the complete design of a tree, but it is another thing to contemplate that almost any part of the tree has the whole design of the tree in it!  Imagine you catch someone trying to scrape of a few cells from his seat in a Boeing 747; with the idea of starting them off in a tissue culture and eventually growing 747 clones.  What's wrong with the idea?  It can work for trees and frogs!  A floppy disk might contain the entire design of an integrated circuit memory chip; but why can't we make more memory chips by immersing the floppy in a nourishing solution instead of sending the floppy to a chip foundry?

The answers have to do with two laws about information;   (1) "All information must have a digital means of its representation."  We must be able to find in a single cell of the tree every bit of the information about the design of the tree.  The second law involves process;  (2) "An informational process transforms the digital representation of the state of a system into its future state."  That a seed contains the design for a tree is not sufficient to transform the seed into the tree.  The information in the seed must be acted upon and transformed like data and programs are acted upon and transformed in the memory of a computer.  The information in the seed is processed and transformed, along with other environmental information and material, in order to grow into the tree.  The floppy may have all of the information about the memory chip, but it needs the environment of the chip foundry to be transformed into memory chips, in the same way that the seed needs fertile earth, sunshine, rain, air and time in order to be transformed into a tree.

Every physical system is subject to the same two laws!