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Life invented digital information three times
What digital means
Digital means that a limited set of symbols, strung into sequences, can encode any amount of information. DNA does it with four bases: A, C, G, and T. English does it with roughly 40 phonemes, depending on the dialect. In the word coffee, none of the sounds carries a meaning by itself, and strung together they do.
Three systems
Computers do it with two symbols, ones and zeros, in machine code that runs extremely long. That makes three separate systems. The genetic code arose very close to the origin of life and was probably the first major event in Earth's history. Language came next, and it let humans encode cultural information and pass it down the generations.
Culture takes over
Once that happened, cultural information began to matter more than genetic adaptation. When people move to the Arctic, they make clothes instead of growing thick fur.
How do four DNA letters build a protein?
The cell reads DNA in groups of three bases called codons. Each codon calls for one of 20 amino acids or signals the end of a protein, so a long sequence of codons spells out the amino acids in order. The cell then folds that chain into a working protein. Nearly all living things use the same codon dictionary.
Why did Shannon's work matter to genetics?
Claude Shannon's 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication introduced the bit as the basic unit of information. Watson and Crick described the structure of DNA five years later, and biologists soon began describing the genetic material as a code. Francis Crick's central dogma of 1958 framed the cell as a system in which information flows from DNA to protein. Molecular biologists still use the language of coding and transcription.
How many sounds do languages use?
Phoneme inventories vary widely. Rotokas, spoken in Papua New Guinea, has only about a dozen. Taa, a click language of southern Africa, has well over a hundred. Linguist Ian Maddieson catalogued this range in the World Atlas of Language Structures.
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