Chapter 3: Biosemiotics and information talk in biology
Chapter 3: Biosemiotics and information talk in biology

Summary/Abstract: ‘Information’ is an important but problematic concept in biology (see Oyama 2000; Stuart 1985; Hoffmeyer, Emmeche 1991; Sarkar 1996; Griffiths 2001; Jablonka 2002). This concept has been recently a topic of substantial discussion (see, e. g., Guimarães 1998; Maynard Smith 2000a; Godfrey-Smith 2000; Sarkar 2000; Sterelny 2000; Wynnie 2000; Jablonka 2002; Adami 2004). The evolution of new kinds of information and information interpretation systems in living beings has also received a great deal of attention recently (see, e. g., Jablonka 1994; Jablonka, Szathmáry 1995; Maynard Smith, Szathmáry 1995, 1999; Jablonka, Lamb, Avital 1998; Jablonka, Lamb 2005). It is even the case that the evolution of different ways of storing, transmitting, and interpreting ‘information’ can be treated as a major theme in the history of life (Maynard Smith, Szathmáry 1995, 1999; Jablonka 2002). Nevertheless, it is not clear at all what is meant by ‘information’ in the biological sciences, particularly in fields which have been swamped, during the 1950s and 1960s, by terms borrowed from information theory, such as genetics and cell and molecular biology.

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