Chapter 6: A semiotic analysis of genes and genetic information: First take
Chapter 6: A semiotic analysis of genes and genetic information: First take

Summary/Abstract: 1. Information talk in action: a textbook description of the ‘flow of information’ in a cell The analysis we will perform here requires that we first present some very general notions about key processes in the genetic information system, namely, transcription, mRNA splicing, and protein synthesis. This section intends to present these basic notions, but it also plays another role in our arguments: we will use it to show how information talk pervades descriptions and explanations in molecular biology and genetics. For these purposes, we present a typical description of the ‘flow of information’ in a cell, according to the central dogma of molecular biology. The section has been built around the treatment of this topic in a widely used textbook, Benjamin Lewin’s Genes VIII, but other textbooks have also been used as sources (Griffiths et al. 1999; Lodish et al. 2003; Alberts et al. 2002; Klug, Cummings 2002). We deliberately avoided introducing a large number of details, which can be easily found in any molecular and cell biology textbook.

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