From life to evolution: the differentiation between storage and interface in natural and cultural systems

It has been long acknowledged that the functional differentiation between storage and interface, proposed by John von Neumann, is the essential condition for the self-reproduction of living beings: enabling evolution, the fundamental separation of memory from interaction increases the chances of open systems to withstand the all-devouring entropic pressure of the surrounding universe. However, the interest in the distinction has been very unevenly spread between natural and social sciences. This preliminary study is an attempt to fill the gap, at least in part.

Admittedly, the DNA code shares with human language a considerable number of features facilitating preservation and exchange of information. Those include invariance to environment, universality, stability, redundancy, ability to code elementary (1-bit) information and express it in partially ordered messages, rich grammar and hierarchically ordered semantics.

To be sure, in the biological world the domination of interface by storage has never been as complete as in the self-reproducing automata envisioned by John von Neumann: the standard direction of information flow (from nucleic acids to proteins) does not – and cannot - exclude the feedback from RNA to DNA. The same reflexivity is even more apparent in culture: while writing and print are usually more conservative and durable then spoken word and hence lend themselves naturally to conservation of canonical information, there is no mandatory and uniform subordination of speech to writing or print in social life. Therefore, it could be argued that culture, unlike nature, relies heavily on second-order practices upholding the differentiation between storage and interface for the purposes of cultural evolution. The whole class of canonical monotheist texts such as Bible or Quran is a poster example of this dynamics, and the final part of this paper seeks to uncover the storage-interface dualism in the monotheist religious communication of the last two millennia.