Authors:
- Based on the engineers' experience, defines information as an abstract entity which can interact with the physical world
- Popularizes information theory and error-correcting codes in order to make them usable by researchers in life sciences
- Shows that heredity and biological evolution cannot be understood unless genomes are endowed with some kind of error-correcting codes
- Shows how life results from the interaction of information with physical entities
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Information as a Scientific Entity
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Front Matter
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Information is Coextensive with Life
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
Communication, one of the most important functions of life, occurs at any spatial scale from the molecular one up to that of populations and ecosystems, and any time scale from that of fast chemical reactions up to that of geological ages. Information theory, a mathematical science of communication initiated by Shannon in 1948, has been very successful in engineering, but biologists ignore it.
This book aims at bridging this gap. It proposes an abstract definition of information based on the engineers' experience which makes it usable in life sciences. It expounds information theory and error-correcting codes, its by-products, as simply as possible. Then, the fundamental biological problem of heredity is examined. It is shown that biology does not adequately account for the conservation of genomes during geological ages, which can be understood only if it is assumed that genomes are made resilient to casual errors by proper coding. Moreover, the good conservation of very old parts of genomes, like the HOX genes, implies that the assumed genomic codes have a nested structure which makes an information the more resilient to errors, the older it is.
The consequences that information theory draws from these hypotheses meet very basic but yet unexplained biological facts, e.g., the existence of successive generations, that of discrete species and the trend of evolution towards complexity. Being necessarily inscribed on physical media, information appears as a bridge between the abstract and the concrete. Recording, communicating and using information exclusively occur in the living world. Information is thus coextensive with life and delineates the border between the living and the inanimate.
Reviews
From the book reviews:
“This book deals with information theory and life sciences. … The readership of this book is mathematicians/information theorists/communications engineers who are interested in biology, and biologists who want to apply information theory to biology.” (Yûichirô Kakihara, Mathematical Reviews, July, 2014)Authors and Affiliations
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E.N.S.T., Paris, France (retired), Chabeuil, France
Gérard Battail
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Information and Life
Authors: Gérard Battail
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7040-9
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life Sciences, Biomedical and Life Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-007-7039-3Published: 12 August 2013
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-007-9335-4Published: 09 August 2015
eBook ISBN: 978-94-007-7040-9Published: 30 July 2013
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 260
Topics: Life Sciences, general, Philosophy of Biology, Information and Communication, Circuits, Mathematical and Computational Biology
Industry Sectors: Biotechnology, Consumer Packaged Goods, Engineering, Pharma