Wang Richard Liangchen
Independent Researcher, Ottawa, ON, Canada.
BBA Adv. 2025 Apr 25;7:100162. doi: 10.1016/j.bbadva.2025.100162. eCollection 2025.
In contemporary biology, the predominant paradigm is that life is chemistry. This means that all biological processes could be reduced to physicochemical processes. Some scientists have argued that life is chemistry plus information, but this ontological claim has not yet been proven. This paper first defines biological information through the decoding process, in which molecular machines such as membrane receptors and ribosomes connect signs to objects. Experiments have shown that molecular machines provide specific mechanisms to unidirectionally connect extracellular signals to intracellular second messengers in signal transduction, and unidirectionally link mRNAs to proteins in genetic information. However, I point out that the unidirectionality or irreversibility of biological information violates the (microscopic) time-reversal symmetry in physical laws and the principle of microscopic reversibility in chemistry. Genetic information also breaks the translational symmetry in physical laws, since the role of nucleotide triplets in translation depends on their position in mRNA. Therefore, biological information is non-physicochemical and differs ontologically from chemistry. This means that the paradigm in biology should be that life is chemistry plus information, rather than that life is merely chemistry. The paradigm of "life is chemistry plus information" succinctly explains that biological information provides an arrow of time in living organisms and why living and nonliving things are so different.
在当代生物学中，主流范式认为生命即化学。这意味着所有生物过程都可归结为物理化学过程。一些科学家认为生命是化学加信息，但这一本体论主张尚未得到证实。本文首先通过解码过程来定义生物信息，在这个过程中，诸如膜受体和核糖体等分子机器将符号与对象联系起来。实验表明，分子机器提供了特定机制，在信号转导中把细胞外信号单向连接到细胞内第二信使，在遗传信息中把信使核糖核酸单向连接到蛋白质。然而，我指出生物信息的单向性或不可逆性违背了物理定律中的（微观）时间反演对称性以及化学中的微观可逆性原理。遗传信息也打破了物理定律中的平移对称性，因为核苷酸三联体在翻译中的作用取决于它们在信使核糖核酸中的位置。因此，生物信息是非物理化学的，在本体论上与化学不同。这意味着生物学中的范式应该是生命是化学加信息，而不是生命仅仅是化学。“生命是化学加信息”这一范式简洁地解释了生物信息如何在生物体中提供了一个时间箭头，以及生物与非生物为何如此不同。
