The universe is made of energy, matter and information.

We can speculate which came first, energy/matter or information. Theists, those who believe in a god or gods, believe that information existed before energy/matter, while natural science states that energy/matter came first in the Big Bang. What supports this claim is the fact that, as far as we know, information cannot exist without energy/matter because it is always encoded into matter, be it as chemical bonds in our DNA, as synapses in our brains, as words on paper or as electrical charges in transistors.

What brings information into existence is life. Life is energy/matter organized by information. The origin of life from non-living matter, or abiogenesis, is still a mystery. What we know is that life started in water, possibly in a hot water vent deep in the sea. Wherever this spark was lit, energy stimulated non-living matter to create a cascading chemical reaction that has yet to stop.

In a universe torn apart by the forces of entropy that increase chaos and disorder, only life can create order and complexity. Information is what gives shape to all living beings. Every egg will break, but none will ever spontaneously re-form. Only life can produce the shape and structure of an egg. Living organisms do this using the information stored in their DNA.

Defining what life actually is escapes easy explanation. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) defines it as a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution. Another useful definition, appropriate for this book, is that life is a metabolic process organized by heritable information. What defines a living cell is its capacity to repair itself using energy/matter from its environment. Only life can hold the forces of entropy at bay in this way.

According to the theory of evolution, plants and animals are hard wired to try to pass on the information stored in their genes to the next generation. From the perspective of evolution, it is actually the survival of this vital information that matters and not the fate of the individual organisms. In his seminal book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins looks at life from the perspective of the genes. He argues that all life forms, including us humans, are merely host vehicles meant to keep genetically coded information alive by transferring it to the next generation.

While all living things will eventually die, the genes inside all of us could technically be immortal. We humans only live once, but our genes have lived millions of lives before us and are likely to live millions of lives after us. By passing on our genes, the information stored inside us will live on in our children and grandchildren. Against incredible odds our genes have successfully passed on their vital information for millions of years without interruption.

What then is the content of all this information that living organisms are driven to perpetuate? Inside each cell we find the exact instructions on how to stay alive in a particular environment. A cactus contains very specific instructions on how to stay alive and reproduce as a plant in hostile desert conditions. A polar bear contains very specific instructions on how to stay alive and reproduce in the arctic climate as an animal. All living beings thus contain very specific descriptions of the environments they evolved in.

When the match between the instructions and the environment is off, the ability of the species to survive diminishes and it becomes less likely that these instructions will be successfully passed on. Conversely, the more suitable the instructions are for their particular environment, the more likely it is that this information will be passed on to the next generation. As the copies of the better instructions outnumber the not-so-good instructions, the future population evolves to become better adapted to its environment. This is how natural selection works.

Life has created a spectacular vessel for storing and transmitting the vital information all living organisms carry within them: DNA. Deoxyribonucleic acid is like a long string of computer code, written in four letters instead of two, that carries the blueprints for everything in our body.

Since life is a constant self-replicating process, there is constant flow of information coming out of the DNA. When our bodies need to replace a protein, a ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecule copies the blueprint for the protein from the DNA. This is called complementary base pairing because the code stored in the RNA is an inverse copy of the DNA molecule. When the RNA then assembles complementary amino acids in the right order, every protein will be a faithful rendition of the information stored in the DNA.

The primary focus of molecular biology is how this information is encoded, stored, proofread and transmitted by cells. Our body’s ability to transfer this information is so accurate that cells make a mistake, or a small mutation, in only one out of every thousand million amino acids they copy. This is like getting a single letter wrong in a library of thousands of books.

Mutations can happen in many different ways and they can improve, impair or have no practical effect on the genetic instructions they are inserted into. If the mutation is an impairment, the copies that carry it will eventually be winnowed out of the population. If the mutation improves the instructions, it will eventually take over the population and make it better adapted to the environment.

To underline how essential information is to life, it seems that aging and dying of old age are the direct results of loss of this information. Scientists believe that aging is directly linked to the deteriorating transfer of genetic information. An older theory posited that when chromosomes are replicated, telomeres, the non-coding DNA strands at the ends of chromosomes, get shorter and shorter until they can no longer protect the integrity of the DNA copies.

A newer theory called the information theory of aging, by David Sinclair and colleagues, proposes that cells age when the DNA loses the epigenetic markers that surround it, which regulate gene expression. What this means is that without the right epigenetic information, a cell forgets what its function in the body is. Since every cell contains all the necessary genetic information the body needs, a nerve cell can start replicating as if it was a skin cell. When faithful reproduction is hampered, the cell and the body start deteriorating, causing aging and eventually death.

One of the more pressing problems confronted by our planet is the extinction of rare plants and animals due to human activity. As our voracious appetite for natural resources increases, our material footprint stomps out part of the incredible diversity of nature. The information hard wired into the genome of these species is not just some random information, but an evolutionary masterpiece with the same billion-year ancestry as our own heritage. Losing a species is like losing a language or burning down a library with rare manuscripts that can never be recovered.

While preserving these genes can undoubtedly have enormous practical benefits, they should also be treated as having value themselves. Faced with a potential sixth mass extinction event, Noah’s Ark is a timely allegory for the enormous responsibility we humans have to preserve the rich genetic information our planet holds.

But what does evolution have to do with how our society functions? The information stored in our genes is not the only information that drives our species. Since the invention of spoken language, our brains have become capable of replicating non-genetic information. Where genetic information is stored chemically in the DNA and transmitted through procreation, cultural information is stored in the human brain and transmitted through language.

This gives rise to cultural evolution.

Wherever you look, you can see how cultural information gives shape to energy/matter, producing the cars we drive, the houses we live in and the way our whole society is organized. A car is a great example of the value cultural information can produce when it is applied to energy/matter. A car can cost tens of thousands of dollars. If you crash the car, none of the energy/matter is lost, but the information that gave the car its shape and made it run is scrambled and it loses most of its value.

This brings us back to the first principles of our challenge. Since our task is to maximize human well-being within planetary boundaries, our central challenge is to first identify and generate the right kind of information our society uses to organize and then build the necessary institutions around it. To do this, we need at least three different kinds of information: one that moves energy/matter, another that tells us where this energy/matter should go and a third that tells us what to do with it once we have it.

For thousands of years, money has been the information we use to move energy/matter around. The marketplace has produced much of the infor mation that we use to allocate our energy/matter. And to make decisions, we have used votes to participate in the democratic process. As sources of information, they help us cooperate. But in their current form, they produce suboptimum results. A central part of our task is therefore to reinvent how the information behind money, markets and our democracy is generated.