Ideas have “spreading power,” he noted-“infectivity, as it were”-and some more than others. “Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.” “Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,” he wrote. Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965 for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, proposed an analogy: just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an “abstract kingdom” rises above the biosphere. And biologists, having absorbed the methods and vocabulary of communications science, went further to make their own contributions to the understanding of information itself. Scientists spoke grandly of the biosphere: an entity composed of all the earth’s life-forms, teeming with information, replicating and evolving. The genetic code-no longer a mere metaphor-was being deciphered.
The rise of information theory aided and abetted a new view of life. Stand back, however, and the past does come back into focus. But our capacity to understand the role of information has been sorely taxed. We have become surrounded by information technology our furniture includes iPods and plasma displays, and our skills include texting and Googling. “If you want to understand life,” Dawkins wrote, “don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment. The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Already one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, he had caught the spirit of a new age. What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life.’ It is information, words, instructions,” Richard Dawkins declared in 1986. With the rise of information theory, ideas were seen as behaving like organisms, replicating by leaping from brain to brain, interacting to form new ideas and evolving in what the scientist Roger Sperry called "a burstwise advance."
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