Fundamentally, Barbieri wants a new information-friendly paradigm without dispensing with the old no-information one. But no one can ride two horses at once.
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Although Barbieri depicts the origin of life as the production of “artefacts,” he certainly does not see himself as an intelligent design theorist.
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In 2016, University of Ferrara theoretical biologist Marcello Barbieri wrote a rather interesting open access paper on a key philosophical conflict in biology: Is life only chemistry or is it chemistry plus information? In it, he says that many biologists see information in life forms — biological information — as something that “does not really belong to science.” How did they get there from here? Author of Code Biology: A New Science of Life (Springer, 2015), Barbieri offers a history, a critique, and a proposed solution. In this three-part series, I will look at all three elements. First, the history. Molecular biology understands genes as transferring linear sequences of information to proteins that carry out instructions. That’s information as it Read More ›