Mind over matter

As an invited speaker at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Manfred Eigen once stood by as his host ran through an impressive list of accolades: his work as a young researcher measuring the rates of ultrafast chemical reactions, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967; his directorship of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Chemistry in Göttingen; his contributions to understanding of the self-organization of prebiotic systems and the ‘RNA world’; and his formulation of the quasispecies and hypercycle theories (together with Peter Schuster). ‘Yes,’ he added when the introduction was done, ‘but you forgot to mention that I am also extremely modest!’ There is no need for modesty in Eigen’s most recent publication From Strange Simplicity to Complex Familiarity: A Treatise on Matter, Information, Life and Thought. In this volume, as in his life’s work, Eigen addresses the most fundamental yet challenging questions in science. This time, he asks (as some others, including Schrödinger [1], have before him): ‘What is life?’ Through incredible detail of both the history of scientific thought on the topic and of the specific theories and experiments that drove progress, Eigen details what we know about this mysterious entity called ‘life’, and how we know it. As Eigen explains, the fundamental physical structures that comprise the matter of the universe exist as a consequence of particular physical laws. There is no particular physical structure that corresponds to life, neither is there any a priori division between living and nonliving matter. Instead, life is a type of behavior of matter. Life is governed by its function, not by its structure. This function is simply to continue to exist, in a constantly changing environment. This existence requires the ability to organize a particular piece of information, and then to be able to conserve, proliferate, vary, and select this information. Error-prone replication is a particular system that is capable of these tasks. As a result of the organization and replication of this information, particular logical structures may emerge, although the principles that govern these structures are only apparent a posteriori. There is a variety of possible structures that could satisfy the functions necessary of life. In understanding this interpretation, the reader is guided through chapters on matter, energy, entropy, information, and complexity. Eigen frequently returns to the intersection of physics and biology, a boundary that he has straddled throughout