Riggs J E
Department of Neurology, West Virginia University School of Medicine, Morgantown 26506.
Mech Ageing Dev. 1993 Jan;66(3):249-56. doi: 10.1016/0047-6374(93)90012-g.
Information theory has provided insight to the means by which organisms maintain life against the inevitable influence of the second law of thermodynamics. The low entropy content of genetic information is used to harness the energy that an organism in an open system must utilize to maintain its low entropy and life. Redundancy lowers informational entropy, enhances meaning and promotes complexity. The genome is characterized by large quantities of 'redundant' DNA. Longitudinal Gompertzian analysis has shown that 'the rate of loss of vitality' (from the Strehler-Mildvan modification of the Gompertz model of aging and mortality) has remained constant for general and disease-specific mortality. Applying the concepts of information theory to aging and mortality suggests that 'the rate of loss of vitality' may be synonymous with the rate of degradation of redundant genetic information (or alternatively, the rate of increase in informational entropy of the genome). This interpretation is consistent with the hypothesis that genetic instability of repeated DNA sequences may be fundamentally related to the process of aging. Consequently, there may be no specific aging or 'death' genes per se, but rather aging and mortality are the inevitable natural consequence of increasing informational entropy (decreasing redundancy) contained within the genome.
信息论为生物体如何对抗热力学第二定律的必然影响来维持生命提供了见解。遗传信息的低熵含量被用于利用开放系统中的生物体为维持其低熵和生命而必须利用的能量。冗余降低了信息熵，增强了意义并促进了复杂性。基因组的特征是存在大量“冗余”DNA。纵向的冈珀茨分析表明，“活力丧失率”（源自衰老和死亡率的冈珀茨模型的斯特勒 - 米尔德万修正）对于总体死亡率和疾病特异性死亡率而言一直保持恒定。将信息论的概念应用于衰老和死亡率表明，“活力丧失率”可能与冗余遗传信息的降解速率同义（或者，与基因组信息熵的增加速率同义）。这种解释与重复DNA序列的遗传不稳定性可能与衰老过程根本相关的假设相一致。因此，可能本身不存在特定的衰老或“死亡”基因，相反，衰老和死亡是基因组中信息熵增加（冗余减少）的必然自然结果。
