Abstract
What is ’biological information’? And how is it related to ‘complexity’? Is the ‘complexity’ of a cell the same thing as the ’complexity’ of a hurricane, or are there two kinds of complexity in nature, only one of which involves the transmission of ’information’? An account of biological information as a set of simplifying conventions used to coordinate the division of labor within cells is offered, and the question of why natural selection might tend to produce such systems of conventions is considered. The somewhat paradoxical role of mutations as occasionally-informative noise is considered, and a very simple formal model of the relationship between natural selection, complexity and information is developed and discussed in relation to adaptive landscapes. The question of whether we should expect evolution to slow down or speed up as the things that are evolving get more complicated is raised and dealt with. Finally, an epistemological moral is drawn, and briefly applied to the case of cancer.
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© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Cloud, D. (2011). Biological Information and Natural Selection. In: Niiranen, S., Ribeiro, A. (eds) Information Processing and Biological Systems. Intelligent Systems Reference Library, vol 11. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19621-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19621-8_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-19620-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-19621-8
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