"... no operation performed by a computer can create new information."

-- Douglas G. Robertson, "Algorithmic Information Theory, Free Will and the Turing Test," Complexity, Vol.3, #3 Jan/Feb 1999, pp. 25-34.

“The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]”

--Kurt Gödel, quoted in H. Wang. “On `computabilism’ and physicalism: Some Problems.” in Nature’s Imagination, J. Cornwall, Ed, pp.161-189, Oxford University Press (1995).

“A central idea in contemporary biology is that of information. Developmental biology can be seen as the study of how information in the genome is translated into adult structure, and evolutionary biology of how the information came to be there in the first place.”

--Eörs Szathmáry and John Maynard Smith, “The Major Evolutionary Transitions,” Nature 374 (1995): pp.227–232.

“The [computing] machine does not create any new information, but it performs a very valuable transformation of known information.”

--Leon Brillouin, Science and Information Theory (Academic Press, New York, 1956).

A "learner... that achieves at least mildly than better-than-chance performance, on average, ... is like a perpetual motion machine - conservation of generalization performance precludes it.”

--Cullen Schaffer on the Law of Conservation of Generalization Performance. Cullen Schaffer, "A conservation law for generalization performance," in Proc. Eleventh International Conference on Machine Learning, H. Willian and W. Cohen. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1994, pp.295-265.

“Any living being possesses an enormous amount of 'intelligence,' very much more than is necessary to build the most magnificent of cathedrals. Today, this 'intelligence' is called 'information,' but it is still the same thing. It is not programmed as in a computer, but rather it is condensed on a molecular scale in the chromosomal DNA or in that of any other organelle in each cell. This 'intelligence' is the sine qua non of life. If absent, no living being is imaginable. Where does it come from? This is a problem which concerns both biologists and philosophers and, at present, science seems incapable of solving it.”

Pierre Grasse, Evolution of Living Organisms: Evidence for a New Theory of Transformation, (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 2.

“A shaping of boundaries may he said to go beyond a mere fixing of boundaries and establishes a ‘controlling principle.’ It achieves control of the boundaries by imprinting a significant pattern on the boundaries of the system. Or, to use information language, we may say that it puts the system under the control of a non-physical-chemical principle by a profoundly informative intervention.”

--Michael Polanyi, “Life Transcending Physics and Chemistry,” Chemical & Engineering News (21 August 1967): 64.

"If a countless number of copies of the one-and-twenty letters of the alphabet, made of gold or whatever you will, were thown together into some receptical and then shaken out on to the ground, [would it] be possible that they should produce the Annals of Ennius? ... I doubt whether chance could possibly succeed in the producing even a single verse!"

--Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 - 43 BC).

"It is possible to fail in many ways, while to succeed it is possible in only one way."

--Aristotle (384 - 322 BC).

“Unless you can make prior assumptions about the ... [problems] you are working on, then no search strategy, no matter how sophisticated, can be expected to perform better than any other”

--Yu-Chi Ho and D.L. Pepyne, "Simple explanantion of the No Free Lunch Theorem", Proc. 40th IEEE Conf. on Decision and Control, Orlando, Florida, 2001.

"The inability of any evolutionary search procedure to perform better than average indicate[s] the importance of incorporating problem-specific knowledge into the behavior of the [search] algorithm.”

--David Wolpert and William G. Macready, "No free lunch theorems for optimization", IEEE Trans. Evol. Comp. 1(1) (1997): 67-82.

“In the face of the universal tendency for order to be lost, the complex organization of the living organism can be maintained only if work – involving the expenditure of energy – is performed to conserve the order. The organism is constantly adjusting, repairing, replacing, and this requires energy. But the preservation of the complex, improbable organization of the living creature needs more than energy for the work. It calls for information or instructions on how the energy should be expended to maintain the improbable organization. The idea of information necessary for the maintenance and, as we shall see, creation of living systems is of great utility in approaching the biological problems of reproduction.”

George Gaylord Simpson and William S. Beck, Life: An Introduction to Biology, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1965), 145.

“The information content of amino acid sequences cannot increase until a genetic code with an adapter function has appeared. Nothing which even vaguely resembles a code exists in the physio-chemical world. One must conclude that no valid scientific explanation of the origin of life exists at present.”

Hubert Yockey, “Self Organization Origin of Life Scenarios and Information Theory,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 91 (1981): 13.

" ‘Organized’ systems are to be carefully distinguished from ‘ordered’ systems. Neither kind of system is ‘random;’ but whereas ordered systems are generated according to simple algorithms and therefore lack complexity, organized systems must be assembled element by element according to an external ‘wiring diagram’ with a high information content.”

Jeffrey S. Wicken, “The Generation of Complexity in Evolution: A Thermodynamic and Information-Theoretical Discussion,” Journal of Theoretical Biology, 77 (April 1979): 353, 349-65.