title: Life is a self-organizing machine driven by the informational cycle of Brillouin.
abstract: Acquiring information is indisputably energy-consuming and conversely, the availability of information permits greater efficiency. Strangely, the scientific community long remained reluctant to establish a physical equivalence between the abstract notion of information and sensible thermodynamics. However, certain physicists such as Szilard and Brillouin proposed: (i) to give to information the status of a genuine thermodynamic entity (k B T ln2 joules/bit) and (ii) to link the capacity of storing information inferred from correlated systems, to that of indefinitely increasing organization. This positive feedback coupled to the self-templating molecular potential could provide a universal basis for the spontaneous rise of highly organized structures, typified by the emergence of life from a prebiotic chemical soup. Once established, this mechanism ensures the longevity and robustness of life envisioned as a general system, by allowing it to accumulate and optimize microstate-reducing recipes, thereby giving rise to strong nonlinearity, decisional capacity and multistability. Mechanisms possibly involved in priming this cycle are proposed.
authors.affiliation: Université de Rennes 1 IRSET U1085 Transcription, Environment and Cancer, Campus de Beaulieu, Bat 13, 35042 Rennes Cedex, France. denis.michel@live.fr
authors.forename: Denis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Michel
mesh_terms: D001669:Biochemical Phenomena; D005075:Biological Evolution; D019295:Computational Biology; D019277:Entropy; D005246:Feedback; D019369:Life; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D000069497:Origin of Life; D013816:Thermodynamics