Abstract
The theme of this symposium is “Communication in Development,” and, as an outsider to the field of developmental biology, I am going to begin by asking a question: How do we tell when there is communication in living systems? Most workers in the field probably do not worry too much about defining the idea of communication since so many concrete, experimental questions about developmental control do not depend on what communication means. But I am interested in the origin of life, and I am convinced that the problem of the origin of life cannot even be formulated without a better understanding of how molecules can function symbolically, that is, as records, codes, and signals. Or as I imply in my title, to understand origins, we need to know how a molecule becomes a message.
Reprinted from Communication in Development, Anton Lang, Ed. Developmental Biology Supplement 3, 1–16 (1969). Academic Press, New York and London.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation. Grant GB 6932 of the Biological Oceanography Program in the Division of Biological and Medical Sciences.
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Pattee, H.H. (2012). How Does a Molecule Become a Message?. In: LAWS, LANGUAGE and LIFE. Biosemiotics, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5161-3_3
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