From Michael Crick, Corbridge, Northumberland, UK
Paul Davies, for whom I have the greatest respect, seems to be invoking a “ghost in the machine” in proposing that we need to consider information as a physical quantity to explain how something made of matter can exhibit the behaviours of life (2 February, p 28). This seems to be invoking an overarching power for information – which seems to me to be an abstract concept.
The universe is what it is, irrespective of our attempts to explain it using language, including mathematics and information theory.
A nucleic acid base just does what it does. In my humble view, information is a human concept – a very useful one, but not “something out there” – and perhaps we risk creating a new mysticism in our own image.
