﻿ Chemistry alone cannot explain the origin of life - Taipei
Times Thu, Jan 17, 2013 - Page 9　News List  Chemistry alone
cannot explain the origin of life  By Paul Davies  /  The
Guardian  Sara Walker, a NASA astrobiologist working at Arizona
State University, and I have proposed that the significant
property of biological information is not its complexity, but
the way it is organized hierarchically. In all physical systems
there is a flow of information from the bottom upwards, in the
sense that the components of a system serve to determine how the
system as a whole behaves. Thus if a meteorologist wants to
predict the weather, he may start with local information taken
at various locations, and calculate how the weather system as a
whole will change. In living organisms, this pattern of bottom-
up information flow mingles with the inverse — top-down
information flow — so that what happens at the local level can
depend on the global environment, as well as vice versa.  To
take a simple example: Whether a cell