Information that Records and Alters its Own Conditions: A mechanistic and computational account of the origin of biological information

Abstract

This document argues that the genetic code is not a static cipher — a fixed lookup table mapping symbols to meanings — but a condition-instructed writing process: its symbol→meaning mapping is set by physical conditions, and the act of writing a mark is a metabolic conversion that consumes the condition and records it, so every mark is at once a memory of a past condition and a change to the system that made it. Underneath the account runs a structural corollary: the genetic material and the cell’s core metabolic currency are the same nucleotides — the pool that records heredity is the pool that runs metabolism — so heredity and metabolism are one chemical system, within which the RNA→DNA conversion is a flux branch point. On this view the mapping has two physically instantiated layers — condition→symbol and symbol→referent, realised in condition-responsive RNA and implemented by molecules rather than by a living cell; the record it writes is heritable and proofread; and the mapping is not assigned but emerges from the chemistry, contingent on the molecular inventory rather than fixed in advance. The argument (1) specifies the mechanism, (2) grounds every step in measured biology, and (3) provides a reproducible model of the contingency such a code must exhibit — stating honestly that the model bounds the mapping layer’s capacity, while the memory that defines the system is realised in the written sequence itself and measured in Section 3.

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