The Concept of Information in Biology

Abstract

It is clear from these quotations that there is something to talk about. I shall be concerned only with the use of information concepts in genetics, evolution and development, and not in neurobiology, which I am not competent to discuss.

A central idea in contemporary biology is that of information. Developmental biology can be seen as the study of how information in the genome is translated into adult structure, and evolutionary biology of how the information came to be there in the first place. Our excuse for writing an article concerning topics as diverse as the origins of genes, of cells and of language is that all are concerned with the storage and transmission of information.

—Szathmáry & Maynard Smith (1995)

Let us begin with the notions involved in classical information theory [...]. These concepts do not apply to DNA because they presuppose a genuine information system, which is composed of a coder, a transmitter, a receiver, a decoder, and an information channel in between. No such components are apparent in a chemical system (Apter & Wolpert 1965). To describe chemical processes with the help of linguistic metaphors like ‘transcription’ and ‘translation’ does not alter the chemical nature of these processes. After all, a chemical process is not a signal that carries a message. Furthermore, even if there were such a thing as information transmission between molecules, this transmission would be nearly noiseless (i.e., substantially nonrandom), so that the concepts of probability, central to the theory of information, does not apply to this kind of alleged information transfer.

—Mahner & Bunge (1997)