  The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and
principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the
microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an
upper bound on the information processing capacity of the universe may resolve
this conflict for systems exceeding a certain threshold of complexity. A
numerical estimate of the threshold places it at the level of a small protein.
The calculation supports the contention that life is an emergent phenomenon.
