Information at the Dawn of Life

An organism’s genome encodes information about how to live in the world. This means information about the internal world, the organism itself, its structure, metabolism and its replication, but also information about the external world, how to sense and respond to it. The information that is coded in the genome is learned over evolutionary time as replication errors result in a random walk through sequence space, ruthlessly trimmed by natural selection. But how do you get a genome in the first place? How do you go from nothing to even a rudimentary genome? How might that primordial genome replicate before it had learned to encode any replication machinery? What barriers had to be overcome before the genome could begin to accumulate information, to learn and encode all of biochemistry? These are some of the issues that I will discuss.