How do I see the difference between a complex system of chemical reactions – however complex you want it to be – many reactions going on forth and back, and a living system which, after all, is also a complex system of chemical reactions? Well, my answer usually is, in the living system everything is controlled and regulated, and the final source of this regulation is information. And this information really organises itself in a way that certain information is called off and certain reaction is triggered, and the whole thing then comes about in a very regulated way. Now, if you ask how did this come about; well, the complex states need information and information in order to come about needs replication, and without replication you can't build up the complexity which is reflected in information.

I'm aware that this is a very different definition one has given in information theory by Shannon and Wiener, where one is more concerned with the aspect of information capacity.  How much information could be expressed in language, how does a transmission line has to be designed in order to allow this amount of information to be transmitted without mistakes in a noise-free way? So these are the two aspects. One has always called the one aspect the quantitative aspect of information, the other the semantic aspect of information, but this is not a very correct type of expression. The one is really an information capacity, it tells you more about language than about any message in that language, whereas the other tells you why did certain messages come about. The messages have a meaning, that's semantics, but they have more than that. They are to be evaluated and the messages for life had to become evaluated... as we have seen, selection is a consequence of replication. Now, when you ask how did this transition occur from the non-life to life, then you certainly needed already a quite developed chemistry before life, the first steps of life, of forming information... it's language, forming in-for-mation... before they could occur. So the first reaction systems certainly were quite chaotic, were quite unregulated. And through this replication system there could be a build-up of information, and that's the essence of life.