Introduction

Today there are two dominant paradigms in biology. One is the chemical paradigm, the idea that “Life is chemistry” or, more precisely, “an extremely complex form of chemistry”. The other is the information paradigm, the idea that “Life is chemistry plus information”. So far neither of them has managed to displace the other: the proponents of the chemical paradigm have not been able to explain why informational processes like heredity and natural selection do not exist in the world of chemistry, and the proponents of the information paradigm have not been able to prove that biological information is ontologically different from chemistry.