Gregory Chaitin is a mathematician at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York state

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Bernd-Olaf Kuppers’ Information and the Origin of life, originally published
in German several years ago, belongs to that handful of books, including
Erwin Schrodinger’s 1944 classic What is Life?, that confront the most fundamental
conceptual problems of biology.

What are these fundamental problems? In a more practical domain, Sydney
Brenner, I believe, put it succinctly. ‘Genetic engineering,’ he said, ‘is
being able to build a centaur!’ At a more conceptual level, the problem,
a physicist might say, is to develop a thermodynamic or statistical mechanics
theory of the origin and evolution of life; while a mathematician would
say that it is to prove when life must arise and evolve, and what its rate
of evolution is.

Such a theory would have to tell us how likely life is to appear and
evolve, to give us a feel for how common life is in the Universe, and whether
it is ubiquitous or extremely rare.

This book discusses the connection between biological information, the
mathematical theory of information and the newer algorithmic version of
information theory. I think it is fair to say that, in spite of the interesting
points of contact between biology and information theory, much remains to
be done and we are far from being able to answer the fundamental questions.

From where is progress likely to come?

On the one hand, rapid advances in understanding the molecular biology
of embryogenesis and development may suggest new versions of algorithmic
information theory more in tune with the actual ‘computer programming’ language
used by DNA to describe how to build organisms.

And I hope that one day we will visit other planets and other solar
systems and get a feel for whether life is common or rare, so that even
if theoreticians make no progress space exploration will eventually give
us the answer. In the short term, I expect experiments with ‘artificial
life’ on massively parallel computers will lead to theoretical developments.

In summary, I would like to repeat a story from Abraham Pais’s forthcoming
book Niels Bohr’s Times (Oxford University Press, pp 656, £25). According
to Pais, Bohr told the following story: ‘Once upon a time a young rabbinical
student went to hear three lectures by a famous rabbi. Afterwards he told
his friends: ‘The first talk was brilliant, clear and simple. I understood
every word. The second was even better, deep and subtle. I didn’t understand
much, but the rabbi understood all of it. The third was by far the finest,
a great and unforgettable experience. I understood nothing and the rabbi
didn’t understand much either.”

Information and the Origin of Life belongs to the latter class. It reminds
us that in spite of the splendid achievements of molecular biology, there
is still much that we do not understand and much to be done.

Gregory Chaitin is at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New
York.