Despite many controversies about the role of information in biology over the past several decades, we can now show that the creation and communication of information is not only necessary to understand biology, but that biology is a proper, if tiny, subset of information creation in the material universe, including the evolution of human minds and the abstract ideas created or discovered by our minds.

Material information creation, in the form of planets, stars, and galaxies, went on for perhaps ten billion years before biological "agents" formed. At some time between three and four billion years ago, multicellular biological agents began to communicate with their component parts and with one another, processing and sharing information.

With the appearance of life, agency, purpose, meaning, and values entered the universe.
This is not a teleological purpose that pre-existed life. It is what Colin Pittendrigh, Jacques Monod, and Ernst Mayr suggested we call teleonomy, a "built-in" purpose. Aristotle called it "entelechy," which means "having a purpose within."

Mayr teaches us that biology is unlike physics and chemistry because it has a history. Our atoms and molecules do not contain information about where they have been in the past, nor do they have any control over where they will be in the future. Many mathematical physicists deny this. If determinism were the case, every particle path would contain that information. But a quantum analysis of statistical physics shows how microscopic path information is destroyed.

Mayr's biology is a history that goes back nearly four billion years. In astronomy we can trace the history of cosmic evolution back 13.7 billion years.

The goal for information philosophy is to write a new story of biological evolution as the growth of information processing, connecting it back into cosmological evolution as the creation of information structures, and illustrating the total dependence of biology on cosmological sources of negative entropy (potential information).

Material information structures formed in the early universe - the elementary particles, atoms and molecules, galaxies, stars, and planets - all as the result of gravitation and quantum cooperative phenomena. But it is not until the emergence of life that information replication and information processing begins. In a deep sense, biology is information processing.

Understanding the origin of life is to understand the concept of living information structures - biological agents that some call "interactors."

An interactor is a clearly definable agent who interacts with other agents by signaling, by coding the abstract information of a message into a material or energetic carrier that travels from the sender to the receiver. The receiver decodes the message and takes an action that depends on the meaning in the message. Interactors are information structures with internal functioning parts that make up an operational organic whole, so messages may be internal to an interactor or external between two interactors.

The messages between interactors - cells, cell components like organelles, or cell combinations in multicellular organisms or communities of cells - are not (merely) "analogous" to human communication or "helpful metaphors." Biological communications have been present from the origin of life. Human communications are in every sense merely a very recent and very special example of (and homologous to) biological communication, despite the fact that most humans think communication is uniquely human. Without the communication and processing of meaningful information, there would be no life.

To understand biology - and humanity - we must understand how the communication and processing of information allows living information structures to carry out their functions. And, thanks to biological evolution, we have the tool needed to understand biology and our selves, the extraordinary human mind.

In the nineteenth century, "emergentists" and "vitalists" argued for new properties for complex organisms that are not present in their component parts, or for new "forces" that infuse mere matter with life. The most obvious evidence for something non-material was that life appears to violate the then recently discovered second law of thermodynamics. Many philosophers and scientists thought that life, and especially mind, could not be possible unless proto-life and proto-mind were already present in all physical particles. This is known as "pan-psychism."

Panpsychism is still very popular among thinkers at the edges of science and religion. Where René Descartes considered mind (res cogitans) as something ontologically and substantially distinct from matter (res extensa), thus creating the mind-body problem, most of his contemporaries (e.g., Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza) and philosophers down to the twentieth century thought mind an essential aspect of matter.

The idea of emergence was implicit in the work of John Stuart Mill and explicit in
the work of "emergentists" like George Henry Lewes, Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad. Some wanted to explain the direct emergence of mind from matter, to solve the mind-body problem, but as Alexander put it, there are at least two distinct steps - first life emerges from the physical-chemical, then mind emerges from life.

Charles Sanders Peirce thought the universe must have a property like mind. He thought the laws of nature were evolving "habits" of such a mind. He thought the chance element in Darwinism made it "greedy." Alfred North Whitehead's "Process Philosophy" is panpsychic, very popular today as "Process Theology." The French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that the creative aspect of evolution cannot be explained by random variation and selection.

Vitalists like Bergson and Hans Driesch may not have used the term emergence, but they strongly supported the idea of teleological (purposeful), likely non-physical causes, without which they thought that life and mind could not have emerged from physical matter.

Influenced by his countryman Bergson and the evolutionary philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel, the philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined an "Omega Point" toward which the universe and life are evolving, with the mind of man participating in the final evolutionary phase, a "noösphere" or mind sphere similar to what might be called an "infosphere," the locus of our Sum of human knowledge..

What these thinkers all have in common is that they believe that the material basis of living things cannot possibly have a creative power. In general, they are all looking for something more powerful than the neo-Darwinian, modern synthesis of biology, in which evolution is driven by variations that depend on ontological chance. A significant fraction of scientists, philosophers, and theologians today have what William James called "antipathy to chance."

The new sciences of complexity and chaos theory are believed by many to provide a new explanation of the origin of life. Ilya Prigogine correctly described the reductions in local entropy of what he called "dissipative structures" as bringing "order out of chaos." Complexity and chaos are deterministic, dynamical theories that generate epistemological uncertainty, which is enough for some thinkers who dislike ontological chance. Complex phenomena very likely supported the formation of pre-biotic structures, "autocatalytic" combinations of elements that synthesized some of their own parts. But no classical dynamical phenomena can explain the origin of genuinely new information in the universe. That requires quantum chance.

Before there was life, the galaxies, stars, and planets had a rich developmental and evolutionary history of their own. Astrophysics tells us that stars radiated energy into space as they dissipated the energy of gravitational collapse (the photons carrying away positive entropy to balance the new spherically symmetric order). The stars paused their collapsing when their interiors reached temperatures high enough to initiate thermonuclear reactions, which converted the lightest elements (hydrogen and helium) into heavier elements. When the fuel is exhausted, the stars resume collapsing, some exploding catastrophically and spreading their newly formed elements out into interstellar space.

Geophysics tells us that the surfaces of planets also go through heating, then cooling, as they radiate away the energy of gravitation. Chemical processes produce ever more complex molecules in the dust and gas clouds of interstellar space and on planetary surfaces. They were produced in the stars as well, but usually they disassociate quickly in a hot star.

When the stream of radiative energy interacts with the planet surface, it provides the necessary "free" energy (with low entropy) to form even more complex information structures, including many of the component macromolecules that are the chemical basis for life. Some of these "prebiotic" macromolecules are produced in small quantities by the ordinary statistics of chemical reactions. These include some macromolecules that play a central role in life today (polynucleotide chains, for example), but they were not organized to work together in any way, and probably had very short lifetimes even though their environment was far from equilibrium.

Life needs the emergence of structures that can replicate macromolecules, multiplying their information. The earliest such replicating information structures probably duplicated a macromolecule on an external template (a catalyst). Replication does not produce new information, only copies of pre-existing information. To be sure, copying errors are new information, and those errors might be themselves replicated to provide the random changes needed in the first step of evolution by variation and natural selection.

But replication, even "self-replication," is not enough to produce the biological world. Billions of years before human beings invented machines, especially our computing machines, complex biological processes evolved that process information and construct new information structures, in ways that resemble how our computer-controlled machines process abstract information and manufacture new material objects, including new "machines."

We are tempted to call these biological processes "biological machines," but we must deprecate the terms "machine," "mechanical," "dynamics," and "dynamical," because they imply processes operating under the laws of classical, deterministic, physics and under the constraints of initial and boundary conditions. Such machines are in principle completely predictable, but in practice unpredictable, because of their sensitivity to the initial conditions and boundary conditions (the "constraints").

In such a world, information is a constant quantity, with a conservation law like that for matter and energy. Many, perhaps most, mathematical physicists subscribe to this view. In the world of classical physics, there is no novelty, "nothing new under the sun." For biology, this is consistent with the idea of intelligent design. Believers in an omnipotent god might allow novel changes over time, but this is logically inconsistent with the omniscience of god, for whom there is only one possible future, the one consistent with god's foreknowledge.

Using the critically important free energy (with low entropy) streaming from the Sun to the Earth (and beyond to the night sky and cosmic microwave background), these extraordinary biological processes manufacture macromolecular "machines" that in turn build macromolecules that cannot be produced spontaneously or reproduced by replication alone, especially the complex proteins (polypeptide chains) that are the moving parts of our biological machines and information processors.