Participating in a messy discussion at scienceforums.net as Hrvoje1, I couldn't help the feeling that the legitimate question of mathematical description of design still eludes scientific community, as well as that of mathematical description of life. Regardless of the question if these two are connected, I have searched a bit for the information on who tackled it so far, and of course found tons of material, some is seminal such as Schrödinger's What is Life? , in a sense that he was among the first physicists to deal with it in a longer essay, and Constructor Theory of Life by Marletto, in a sense that she and Deutsch went further than anyone else in their investigation, that I already knew, however there is also Chris Adami, Fritjof Capra, ... and many others. There is also Elsberry and Shallit versus Dembski discussion/critique Information Theory, Evolutionary Computation, and Dembski's Complex Specified Information , that I didn't study very careful...