Abstract
The advent and the upkeep of life is intimately related to the generation, processing and propagation of information on the molecular level. To understand and to analyze the basic processes of life in a scientifically satisfying and pertinent way, the concept of information will have to be added, therefore, to the list of basic concepts like energy, matter, entropy, etc., developed and clarified in the natural sciences during the last centuries [1]. Information, even though it is encoded in terms of specific spatial and/or temporal forms, patterns, or structures of matter, cannot be identified with its physical carrier or host—just as a river or even a simple wave cannot be identified with the water it carries along.
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Dress, A. (1995). Some Mathematical Problems Arising in Molecular Bioinformatics: The Concept of Bioinformatics. In: Colbourn, C.J., Mahmoodian, E.S. (eds) Combinatorics Advances. Mathematics and Its Applications, vol 329. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3554-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3554-2_6
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