Information and Living Systems

by Terzis, George; Arp, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780262201742
• ISBN10: 0262201747
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-15
• Publisher: Bradford Books

Summary

Information shapes biological organization in fundamental ways and at every organizational level. Because organisms use information--including DNA codes, gene expression, and chemical signaling--to construct, maintain, repair, and replicate themselves, it would seem only natural to use information-related ideas in our attempts to understand the general nature of living systems, the causality by which they operate, the difference between living and inanimate matter, and the emergence, in some biological species, of cognition, emotion, and language. And yet philosophers and scientists have been slow to do so. This volume fills that gap. Information and Living Systemsoffers a collection of original chapters in which scientists and philosophers discuss the informational nature of biological organization at levels ranging from the genetic and to the cognitive and linguistic. The chapters examine not only familiar information-related ideas intrinsic to the biological sciences but also broader information-theoretic perspectives used to interpret their significance. The contributors represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, chemistry, cognitive science, information theory, philosophy, psychology, and systems theory], thus demonstrating the deeply interdisciplinary nature of the volume's bioinformational theme.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
Introduction	p. xi
The Definition of Life	p. 1
The Need for a Universal Definition of Life in Twenty-first-century Biology	p. 3
Energy Coupling	p. 25
Information and Biological Organization	p. 53
Bioinformation as a Triadic Relation	p. 55
The Biosemiotic Approach in Biology: Theoretical Bases and Applied Models	p. 91
Problem Solving in the Life Cycles of Multicellular Organisms: Immunology and Cancer	p. 131
The Informational Nature of Biological Causality	p. 157
The Self-construction of a Living Organism	p. 177
Plasticity and Complexity in Biology: Topological Organization, Regulatory Protein Networks, and Mechanisms of Genetic Expression	p. 205
Information and the Biology of Cognition, Value, and Language	p. 251
Decision Making in the Economy of Nature: Value as Information	p. 253
Information Theory and Perception: The Role of Constraints, and What Do We Maximize Information About?	p. 289
Attention, Information, and Epistemic Perception	p. 309
Biolinguistics and Information	p. 353
The Biology of Personality	p. 371
Contributors	p. 407
Index	p. 409
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