has implications concerning the widely held belief in abiogenesis – viz. that somehow RNA and DNA can self-organize and produce the DNA code from matter alone, along with the more recently discovered bioelectric coding systems. It is this very area that has become a battleground of worldviews in recent years as evidence mounts against the philosophical naturalist concept that teleology, purpose and non-material coding can ‘emerge’ out of matter given enough time. Not only the evidence of the thermodynamics of the cellular machinery, but the evidence of the coded instructions and their interaction with the thermodynamics discussed in this paper, strongly indicates the top-down design thesis is the correct way to understand the interacting systems and sub-systems. Indeed, it is argued here that it is only the top-down approach which gives a robust framework to further research into how coding relates to the thermodynamically efficient flow of energy in biological systems. In this paper the author is moving beyond the battle over worldviews which has been discussed earlier in the papers referenced above, and proposing a Biblical and robust model of the information / material interface. In this work it is necessary that there is some overlap with previous publications in order that the reader is made familiar with relatively new concepts, but it is the intention that the main thrust of this work is to build further on the concepts already outlined and to show how language itself is the key to advancing an understanding of how biological systems control the workings of the cellular machinery. II. INFORMATION IS NON-MATERIAL AND TRANSCENDENT TO MATTER AND ENERGY In the author’s earlier paper McIntosh (2013) it was proposed that information is essentially defined as non-material coded instructions which follows the seminal work of Gitt (1989, 2000). It is significant that the well-known evolutionary biologist George C Williams has also stated (Williams 1995) that information has to be thought of in terms which are not connected with the chemistry and physics, when he stated, Information doesn’t have mass or charge or length in millimetres. Likewise, matter doesn’t have bytes. You can’t measure so much gold in so many bytes. It doesn’t have redundancy, or fidelity, or any of the other descriptors we apply to information. This dearth of shared descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms. That information is a real but non-material entity, is a logical deduction and strongly suggests that not only is information to be considered as separate and transcendent to matter and energy, but that its origins are also not emergent from matter either. The proposal is that the information is the product of intelligence and constrains the local thermodynamics. This is what is called the top-down approach. So that when information interacts with matter (see McIntosh 2009, p. 378) the proposal was made that it always uses a machine where a machine is defined explicitly according to the Thermodynamic Principle (1) above in section 1B. The top-down proposal illustrated in Fig. 1 is that the information system of which the Watson-Crick pairing of the nucleotides is the most well-known (but may well not be the sum total), is essentially a non-material system which transcends the substrate of the DNA double helix molecule, and is not defined by the thermodynamic bonds of the triplets of the 4 nucleotides which code for the 20 amino acids. The proposal and assertion in this paper is that the reverse is true – viz. that the information is non-material and actually constrains the thermodynamics. This top-down approach fits with the science and agrees with Col 1:17 “… He [Christ] is before all things, and by him all things consist.” The word “consist” literally means “to be set together” which along with John 1:1 and Heb 1:3 “upholding all things by the word of his power” shows that it is Christ who has declared everything into existence and supports the whole universe, especially in terms of living things. One part of the evidence of this is that the instructions we have within DNA are actually constraining the chemistry and physics of living systems. Biopolymers could not change radically such that a low entropy and sustained sequence of free energies would emerge (see McIntosh 2013 section 3.1). To alter the DNA constituents from one stable state say to another representative state with a distinct improvement, cannot be done by natural means alone without additional information. The laws of thermodynamics are against such a procedure. Put another way the carrier molecules of the information in living systems are actually kept in a non-equilibrium state by the very presence of the coded information. They would fall apart to a disordered equilibrium state were it not for the information in the system making them act in this way. What is remarkable is that in recent years more evidence has emerged (Nikolova et al. 2011) that there is a further layer of information transfer in evidence which is beyond the Watson-Crick pairing of nucleotides – that is that there is what is called a ‘Hoogsteen base pairing’ where a different part of the nucleotide base is temporarily used to connect the coding and complimentary parts of the DNA, and thus this constitutes a second transient layer of the genetic code. This finding adds a whole new dimension to the thermodynamic hurdles that must be overcome if one were to insist on the bottom-up approach to information somehow emerging from matter and energy. This would imply that if evolution were true, and in particular abiogenesis, then not only would the whole DNA code have developed from the chemistry and physics with all the thermodynamic free energy hurdles we have already discussed, but also on top of this, there would need to be control of a suite of thermodynamic raised free energies by an entirely different information system, all in concert with the Watson-Crick pairing at the same time! III. THE CONNECTION OF INFORMATION WITH ENERGY A. Information has an energy cost – the Landauer principle Landauer (1961, 1996a, 1996b) asserted that the erasure of one bit of information will be accompanied by an entropy gain of at least k ln2 J/K where k is the Boltzmann constant (1.38 × 10-23 J/K). So, at a temperature T there will be a heating effect in Joules of at least kT ln2 to the surrounding environment. Any logically irreversible transformation of information (i.e. where the output is such that the input cannot be uniquely determined from that output) is necessarily MCINTOSH Language, codes, & interaction with thermodynamics 2023 ICC 318
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