One of my long-standing interests has been informational gap-bridging, examining different conceptions of information, and how they may manifest in the physical and biological sciences. Ideas of information as a component of the biological sciences have grown steadily since Lila Gatlin’s pioneering studies of the information content of the genetic code.
In an open access paper in Synthase 2024, Steinar Thorvaldsen, Peter Øhrstrøm, and Ola Hössjer (referred to as TOH later in this post), from the universities of Tromsø, Aalborg and Stockholm respectively, give a fascinating development of the idea of information in biology generally, and genetics specifically. Characterising information as “a major notion of present biology”, TOH begin by citing Wiener and Wheeler, and noting that von Neumann drew ideas from genetics in setting out his well-known architecture for a digital computer. Their ambitious aim is to”bring coherence to the domain of biology by focusing on information as a unifying and computable concept … to provide some common conceptual ground for further scientific exploration of the role of information in genetic systems, with a particular focus on gene families”.
The paper sets out an overview of ideas of the nature of information, as it may relate to biology, from Schrödinger to Shannon and Weaver through Dretske to Floridi. There is a detailed examination of different conceptions of information in biology, information being defined in a general sense as “all that which is communicated”, and hence much more than just the protein and DNA sequences which have typically been the subject of information theoretic analysis. This leads TOH to place an emphasis on the relevance of instructional or algorithmic information, and of active information. Here they propose an extension to Floridi’s well-known model of information, first set out in his 2010 Information: a Very Short Introduction. As shown in the diagram below, this essentially expands the idea of environmental and instructional information in a way relevant to genetics, the new extensions shown in bold type.
One confounding factor in gap-bridging exercises of applying information concepts to the physical and biological sciences is the need to include both qualitative and quantitative aspects of information, which have proved difficult to reconcile. TOH address the problem head on, examining qualitative aspects of genetic information, which may be denoted as semantic, conveying meaning, and also how to measure it quantitatively, based on extensions of Shannon’s formalism. This leads to a model, also clearly with its original in Floridi’s original model, for quantitative and qualitative information in genetics, as in the diagram below.
In their conclusions, TOH argue that information is not just a metaphor in biology – ” support for this sceptical response is fading” – and that “informational concepts have robust scientific application at the level of genes”, with information “a truly inherent property of life”. Going beyond their domain of analysis, they suggest that “new scientific and philosophical thinking and work may eventually lead to a full recognition of a ternary informational ‘domain’ that exists alongside the domains of spacetime and energy/matter”. This last is arguably the insight that has stimulated much of the thought in information gap-bridging, notably that of Tom Stonier, and the work of TOH is a significant advance in this direction.
This paper is certainly thought provoking, and is well-referenced, and should be of interest to anyone interested in the wider concept of information, and not just in biology. Some parts are technical, but it can, and should, be read by anyone with an interest in informational gap bridging.
Further reading
Bawden, D. and Robinson, L. (2020) Still minding the gap? Reflecting on transitions between concepts of information in varied domains. Information, 11(2), 71; https://doi.org/10.3390/info11020071.
Gatlin, L.L. (1972) Information theory and the living system. New York: Columbia University Press.
Floridi, L. (2010) Information: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stonier, T. (1990) Information and the internal structure of the universe. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
Thorvaldsen, S., Øhrstrøm, P. and Hössjer, O. (2024) The representation, quantification, and nature of genetic information. Synthese 204, 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04613-z
The Occasional Informationist 