Information without Code: A Physical Origin of Biological Memory

The origin of life is commonly described through biochemistry and genetic information, most notably within the RNA world hypothesis. Such approaches, however, implicitly assume the existence of a code, templates, and mechanisms of reading and replication, which themselves require prior organization. Here we propose an alternative framework: information without code, understood as a stabilized outcome of non-equilibrium physical dynamics in open systems. In this view, information does not arise as a symbolic sequence but as a historically selected mode of system behavior that persists due to continuous energy flow and entropy production. Building on Ilya Prigogine’s non-equilibrium thermodynamics, this approach allows a physically consistent interpretation of prebiotic memory and selection prior to genetic coding. Biological information is thus interpreted as a later formalization of an originally non-coded physical memory.