Prolonging the 1960´s Structuralism, expressed in the natural sciences as System Theory, views exist today which reduce life to information. They of course neglect non-structural phenomena, yet remain adequate enough to depict organisms inasmuch as organical. (For the complementary views on this point see M. Szirko, Mario Crocco, chapters 11 & 12 in Wautischer, Helmuth, Ontology of Consciousness, LibGen ID nr. 541045.) On the contemporary structuralist stance, this book explores the unity of life, proposing that the concept of information is the inner essence of what we today call life. The importance of information for our species is obvious. Human beings are highly dependent on information, constantly exchanging with conspecifics. In a less apparent way, we are the product of genetic and epigenetic information which determines our development in a given environment from a fertilized egg to the adult stage. Even less apparent is that information plays a determining role in ecosystems. This observation may include the prebiotic systems in which life emerged. Our claim is that Nature processes information continuously. This means that even beyond living entities, we can see messages and decoding procedures. Nature can be said to send messages to its own future and then to decode them. Nature “talks” to itself! The systematic organization of messages suggests that, in some respects, we should even speak of the “languages” of Nature.
Author(s): Cédric Gaucherel and Pierre-Henri Gouyon
Publisher: ISTE-Wiley
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 206
Tags: Information, Hidden Side, Life
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii
Chapter 1. Human and Animal Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. Language, that amazing thing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2. The mechanics of language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3. What is syntax? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.4. Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.5. Beyond meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.6. Non-human languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.7. Types of language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.8. Why give information? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.9. The autonomy of information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.10. Language and information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Chapter 2. Genetic Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.1. A central concept in biology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.2. Epigenetic information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.3. The environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.4. Information: from replication to reproduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.5. Mutation and selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.6. The story of the message: phylogeny and coalescence . . . . . . . . . . 52
2.7. The point of view of the reading system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
2.8. We cannot see the wood for the trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
2.9. The tree and the web … and some complexities there! . . . . . . . . . . 64
2.10. When information and individual can no longer be confused . . . . . . 66
2.11. Conflicts and levels of integration: avatars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
2.12. Sociobiology, altruism and information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
2.13. The “all genetics” versus epigenetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
2.14. What is Life? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Chapter 3. Ecosystem and Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.1. An information-centered perspective of the ecosystem . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.2. Reservoirs of ecosystemic information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.3. Biodiversity: an ecosystem made up of individuals . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.4. Phylogeny of communities: biology in the arena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
3.5. The ecosystem: a physical system or a biological system? . . . . . . . . 92
3.6. An ecosystem made up of matter and energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.7. Failure of the physical approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
3.8. Physics has not said its last word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
3.9. The great challenges of ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
3.10. Flow and balance of ecosystemic information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
3.11. Ecosystemic codes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3.12. The languages of the ecosystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Chapter 4. Can We Define Information? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
4.1. Information as surprise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
4.2. Information measured by complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
4.3. Information as organized complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
4.4. Information as compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
4.5. Coding and information reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
4.6. Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Chapter 5. Evolution of Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
5.1. In the beginning was structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
5.2. The first languages were ecosystemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
5.3. The replicators and the conservators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
5.4. Biological languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
5.5. Information selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
5.6. Messages and languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
5.7. The complexification of codes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
5.8. Complexification of languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
5.9. The re-creation of life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
5.10. And what about tomorrow? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
