Life: Energy-information relationship within material systems—I. General outline of the concept

Abstract

Neither the statistical theory of information nor the thermodynamics of dissipative structures are able to explain the nature of the living system. The biological system, being a material system, may be characterized and experimentally verified by such general notions as mass, energy and information. A consideration of the relationship between energy and information within the living system is attempted. The energy and information are treated as coupled values in describing such a system. The notion of biofunction is understood as intrinsic flow and transformation of the info-energy (information-energy) coupled values. Understanding of the content of this flow and its transformations is a basis for a coherent meaning of energy, thermodynamic entropy, information and control within the living system. The mass, energy and information categories are not only descriptive means of the system, but also additive operative values on the microlevel of the physical phenomena proceeding within the living system. Proceeding reactions within it are based on certain values of the involved energy and informational components directing the process, determined by the specificity of the structure of the system as well as by the synchronization of events (in time) of the considered process. Consideration of the examples of the function of a biological membrane and its models, calculations of experimental equivalents of information negentropy and lowering the energy cost of biological reactions during onto- and phylogenesis lead us to the conclusion that lowering the energy cost of biological reactions decisive in the emergence of the living system and its biological evolution. The specificity of the structural and functional organization of the living system is in a mutual energy-information relationship. This relationship has an opposite and extreme character.