Yockey, Hubert P. (1916- )

American born physicist, radiation specialist, and pioneer in the application of information theory to living systems and the genetic code. Born in Minnesota, Yockey took an undergraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley. There, too, he completed his PhD in Physics in 1942. For the next forty years he worked within the American defense establishment, both in government service and the private sector. He specialized in problems of aerospace design and pulse radiation. He ended his active career as Chief of the Army Radiation Pulse Division (1980-85) and at the Nuclear Effects Directorate (1985-87).

Beginning in the 1960s, influenced by Dr. Henry Quastler, Yockey began to explore the nature of information inherent in the organization of living things. In the 1940s, Schroedinger had proposed the sequence hypothesis, suggesting that the "genetic message" might be recorded in sequences of nucleotides and amino acids. Watson and Crick, in their working out the structure of DNA, proved the inherent accuracy of this idea and provided the basis for specific analysis. In his 1954 Nature article, George Gamow had shown that "DNA sequences of four letters (A, C, G, T) determine the protein sequences of 20 letters." The letters, A, C, G and T refer to the four molecules, Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine and Thymine, that make up the nucleotide bases of DNA. Thus, biological form is the result of a non-material code (information) carried via a material transmission system.

Given that, argued Yockey and others, the information content of biological systems should be and is susceptible to the same analysis communications engineers apply to mechanical information transfer devices: the information theory first proposed by R.V.L. Hartley in the 1920s and formalized by Claude E. Shannon in the 1940s. In other words, it appeared that not chemistry and physics but mathematics and statistical theory might be the best basis for the analysis of particular features of the molecular chemistry of life. Other unexpected conclusions emerging from the synthesis of information theory and molecular biology included a distinct challenge to the neo-Darwinian paradigm of random, abiogenic origin of life and speciation via mutation and selection. The challenge to all current models of abiogenesis was that chance or random organization of the chemical components of life is of a probability so statistically small as to be beyond possibility. Biologist Robert Shapiro, among others, made the same point.

In response to these charges, other biologists and chemists pointed out that chemicals do not interact in a purely random manner and that Yockey's calculations rely upon unrealistic, assumptions of a priori probabilities. In either case, Yockey suggested, in light of these mathematical constraints, that the origin of life (and the universe) might simply be beyond human understanding, just as there are in mathematics problems that are known to have no solutions. Indeterminacy and unknowability may be the reality of the origin of life. Along these lines, Yockey worked to prove that the "Primordial Soup" theories of Oparin, and his successors, the "Self-organization and hypercycles" theory of Manfred Eigen, as well as the "Proteinoid microspheres" theories of Sydney Fox and his adherents, were not viable given the constraints of actual chemistry and statistical probability. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Yockey developed an extensive bibliography of published papers and articles laying out the use and implications of information theory in biology.

George Gamow, "Possible relation between deoxyribonucleic acid and protein structure," Nature, 1954.

Dean L. Overman, A Case Against Accident and Self Organization, (New York, 1997).

Hubert P. Yockey, Information Theory and Molecular Biology, (Cambridge, 1992).