From chemistry to biology: where does the information go?

How much of chemistry can we understand by situating its products and processes in “chemical space”? The question is partly about how much chemistry’s qualitative and heuristic rules of thumb can be reduced to quantitative concepts and metrics, but it is also a matter of what the most informative scale of reductionism is. That issue becomes even more acute as chemistry morphs into biology – which is why it seems surprising that the reductionistic impulse, seeking explanations (even for behavioural observations, say) in gene sequences or protein structures, appears to be even stronger in the life sciences. In this talk I explore how current work in complex chemical systems and in molecular biology is changing our notions of what the most “informative levels” of these systems are.