Top-Down Causation and the Rise of Information in the Emergence of Life

Biological systems represent a unique class of physical systems in how they process and manage information. This suggests that changes in the flow and distribution of information played a prominent role in the origin of life. Here I review and expand on an emerging conceptual framework suggesting that the origin of life may be identified as a transition in causal structure and information flow, and detail some of the implications for understanding the early stages chemical evolution.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Inf.

• Publication date

  2014-07-21

• Fields of study

  Biology, Sociology, Philosophy, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3390/info5030424
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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