Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika at Noema:
Claims that computing underlies physical reality are hard to prove or disprove, but a clear-cut case for computation in nature came to light far earlier than Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis. John von Neumann, an accomplished mathematical physicist and another founding figure of computer science, discovered a profound link between computing and biology as far back as 1951.
Von Neumann realized that for a complex organism to reproduce, it would need to contain instructions for building itself, along with a machine for reading and executing that instruction “tape.” The tape must also be copyable and include the instructions for building the machine that reads it. As it happens, the technical requirements for that “universal constructor” correspond precisely to the technical requirements for a UTM [a Universal Turing Machine]. Remarkably, von Neumann’s insight anticipated the discovery of DNA’s Turing-tape-like structure and function in 1953.
Von Neumann had shown that life is inherently computational.
More here.
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