Book review of Bernd-Olaf Kuppers

Bernd-Olaf Kuppers:
INFORMATION AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE (MIT Press, 1990)

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Kuppers thinks that all living phenomena, such as metabolism and inheritance, can be reduced to the interaction of biological macromolecules, i.e. to the laws of Physics and Chemistry, and, in particular, the living cell originated from the iterative application of the same fundamental rules that preside to all physical and chemical processes.
The issue of the origin of life is reduced to the issue of the origin of biological information. Information is viewed in its different aspects: syntactic (as in information theory), semantic (function and meaning of information for an organism's survival), and pragmatic (following von Weiszacker, "information is only that which produces information"). Following Manfred Eigen and in opposition to Jacques Monod, Kuppers favors the hypothesis that the origin of life from inorganic matter is due to emergent processes of self-organization and evolution of macromolecules. Natural selection applies to the molecular level.
Kuppers presents rigorous mathematical proofs of his theory, often resorting to algorithmic theory (e.g., Gregory Chaitin's quantitative determination of information in a structure).
Since evolution depends on the semantic aspect of information, there is no contradiction with the second law of thermodynamics, which is about the structural aspect of matter (i.e., the syntactic aspect of information).
The origin of life is the origin of biological information. The origin of syntactic information relates to the prebiotic synthesis of biological macromolecules. The origin of semantic information relates to the self-organization of macromolecules.
In the balance between law and chance, only the general direction of evolution is determined by natural law: the detailed path is mainly determined by chance. Natural law entails biological structures, but does not specify which biological structures.