Information is not a description applied to matter after the fact, but is given along with the spin and position of its smallest constituents from the very beginning. From this premise of information physics, the essay develops a hypothesis about the question of where biological information stores originally obtain their information, and it seeks the answer not first in life, but in matter itself. The starting point is quantum Darwinism, according to which the state of a system imprints itself redundantly upon its environment and, precisely through this redundancy, becomes independently accessible to many observers, that is, objective. Because storage and energy remain finite and every record physically costs something, every system stands under a twofold pressure: to continually accumulate copies while at the same time encoding them ever more sparingly. From this tension the essay grounds both the distinction between static and dynamic information and the thesis that selection and adaptation arise as a substrate-neutral consequence already from the physics of matter, without requiring new laws of nature. As a unifying motif, the essay introduces the replication hypothesis, according to which physically embodied information tends to be multiplied and is thereby driven, over generations, toward ever more efficient packaging. This single tendency is traced across successive levels, from the quantum substrate through the genome and the human brain to artificial systems that require ever less energy per computational step. The individual links of the chain rest on established research, whereas their integration into a single, directed movement remains designated as a hypothesis. Its appeal lies in offering a parsimonious alternative for the origin of biological information, one in which evolution is not the counterpart to physics but its continuation by other means.
Tobias Hoffmann (Tue,) studied this question.