In biology, there has been a tremendous revolution in the understanding of the basis of all living things, but the enormity of that change has not yet had an effect on our philosophy. The change is that we used to think that the characteristics of the progeny of any living thing were determined by some unknown and mysterious mechanisms. Sixty years ago science had already given up on vitalistic concepts, but nevertheless accepted that chemistry worked in ways not understood with regard to the mysteries of biology.
Today it is obvious that attributes of living things are written down in a digital code. We now know that some process, involving information encoded in DNA, is at the heart of cell differentiation as a zygote develops into an embryo. Could we have anticipated all this before the discovery of DNA? The answer is “Yes!”
Mendel’s laws involve small integers (like 1 and 0, male and female or True and False) and simple ratios like ¼ or ½. A world of nothing but continuous variables with mysterious interactions amongst those variables has little chance of producing laws similar to Mendel’s.
There is obviously a lot of information in a seed. Gametes bring information together to form a zygote. Digital Philosophy could have predicted that the underlying mechanisms of inheritance and growth were most likely to have at their core a system of digitally represented information.
Three key elements that lend support the possibility of an underlying digital model are:
1. The appearance of small integers in mathematical laws.
2. Hierarchies of structures (or small groups of structures, such as male-female pairs), each of which is functionally identical to others of the same species.
3. The existence of inherent information and inherent information processing.
Insofar as normal chemistry, each atom of a given element is functionally identical to every other atom of the same element. Of course there are isotopes, but normal chemistry is usually blind to that distinction. In the case of life, we have atoms, simple molecules, proteins and finally DNA and cells, with the G and C plus A and T as the elements of a genetic code where the details of the atoms that make up a molecule of Guanine, for example, do not matter in the ensuing informational processes of a DNA molecule. Functionally identical structures extend all the way up to all the males or all the females of the same species. While each such member of a species has distinct characteristics, they all share the fact that they can all interbreed with each other; the functional identity.
The characteristics of all the different species of living things represent a great deal of additional information. Further, the precise characteristics of each of the members of a given species also represent a great deal of information. Most biologists do not think about the processes of life in the same ways as would a Digital Philosopher. Yet some kind of information processing in living things begins with the informational process of sperm and egg combining and continues with differentiation as a kind of computation based on inherited information and finally, as is obvious for all creatures that move, behavior involves information processing on a more familiar level.
What we have been describing are some of the clues that could have allowed believers in Digital Philosophy to hypothesize that the basic, most microscopic representation of information, that governs heredity and growth, must be a digital representation. Years ago there were no practitioners or followers of Digital Philosophy and the digital basis of genetic information remained outside of the conscious thoughts of most biologists, even as a possibility, until the discovery of the structure and nature of DNA.
Today, a follower of Digital Philosophy could still predict that we will discover that digital processes govern the growth and development of living things. Perhaps life is based on digital informational processes involving the digital information encoded in DNA. It is obvious to a few (including the author and Stephen Wolfram) that such digital processes as seen in cellular automata are possible explanations and models for many of the informational processes in biology.
Last Revised 22 October 2001