Crystal ball

Telescopes reveal that elements are formed through the recombination of subatomic particles within supernovae, producing the nebulae in which galaxies coalesce. Microscopes reveal that eukaryotic organisms form through the recombination of prokaryotic cells, producing plants and animals that recombine to propagate as communities. Microscopists and astronomers alike have thus begun to wonder whether genetic recombination is just one of many recombinational events involved in innovation and evolution. If so, then perhaps nucleic acids are minor components in a universal information system so vast and effective that the positioning of each element codes for the functionality of a nested series of additional elements. This would be analogous to a computer system in which information is so effectively stored that every bit of hardware is also a bit of software. This may be the universe that awaits our exploration at the dawn of the information age. In the words of Ramon Margalef (1963) `Let us imagine the structure of a community in terms of a message, written in a language with a number of symbols equal to the number of species, and where individual symbols stand for individuals'. He goes on to discuss the possibility that objects such as `dead wood' and `rabbit burrows' are `elements of organization' functioning as informational structures in that they are the product of a `series of decisions' that in ̄uence the future development and propagation of ecosystems. From Margalef's perspective, each object is functional in terms of its activity, but each object is also informational in terms of its positioning (in terms of the strategic signi®cance, with respect to propagation, inherent in the spatial and temporal positioning of its activity in relation to the activity of other objects). If all of this should prove true, then life would no longer be thought of as an infection within a dead universe. Nor could life be described solely in terms of individual and group sporting events. Life would be innate within the space±time relationships of all chemical, physical and biological objects. It would be neither a competition for resources nor a cooperation to obtain resources. Creative thought, in the form of seemingly coincidental trial and error, would de®ne the limits of the universe, the scope of achievements and the speed of evolution, the size of the universe being limited only by the number of levels created in an informational hierarchy that expands exponentially as each level of language or code is created. If this should prove true, then natural selection, k selection and r selection would become the great superstitions of the twentieth century, and will represent the greatest barrier to enlightened scienti®c thought in the third millennium.