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proyectos:tfg:bibliografia:stotz2017 [2017/10/27 09:06] 127.0.0.1 editor externo |
proyectos:tfg:bibliografia:stotz2017 [2017/11/15 08:53] (actual) Joaquín Herrero Pintado |
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| - | ====== Stotz, K., Biological Information, Causality, and Specificity: An Intimate Relationship ====== | + | ====== Stotz, K., Biological Information, Causality, and Specificity: An Intimate Relationship (2017) ====== |
| en Imari Walker, S. (ed), 2017, From Matter to Life – Information and Causality | en Imari Walker, S. (ed), 2017, From Matter to Life – Information and Causality | ||
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| + | The lack of a rigorous account of biological information as a proximal causal | ||
| + | factor in biological systems is a striking gap in the scientific worldview. In | ||
| + | this chapter we outline a proposal to fill that gap by grounding the idea of | ||
| + | biological information in a contemporary philosophical account of causation. | ||
| + | Biological information is a certain kind of causal relationship between | ||
| + | components of living systems. Many accounts of information in the | ||
| + | philosophy of biology have set out to vindicate the common assumption that | ||
| + | nucleic acids are distinctively informational molecules. Here we take a more | ||
| + | unprejudiced approach, developing an account of biological information and | ||
| + | then seeing how widely it applies. | ||
| + | |||
| + | In the first section, ‘Information in Biology’, we begin with the most | ||
| + | prominent informational idea in modern biology – the coding relation | ||
| + | between nucleic acid and protein. A deeper look at the background to Francis | ||
| + | Crick’s Central Dogma, and a comparison with the distinction in | ||
| + | developmental biology between permissive and instructive interactions, | ||
| + | reveals that ‘information’ is a way to talk about specificity. The idea of | ||
| + | specificity has a long history in biology, and a closely related idea is a key | ||
| + | part of a widely supported contemporary account of causation in philosophy | ||
| + | that grounds causal relationships in ideas about manipulability and control. In | ||
| + | the second section, ‘Causal Specificity: An Information-Theoretic Approach’, | ||
| + | we describe the idea of ‘causal specificity’ and an information-theoretic | ||
| + | measure of the degree of specificity of a cause for its effect. Biological | ||
| + | specificity, we suggest, is simply causal specificity in biological systems. | ||
| + | Since we have already argued that ‘information’ is a way to talk about | ||
| + | biological specificity, we conclude that causal relationships are | ||
| + | ‘informational’ simply when they are highly specific. The third section, | ||
| + | ‘Arbitrariness, Information, and Regulation’, defends this identification | ||
| + | against the claim that only causal relationships in which the relation between | ||
| + | cause and effect is ‘arbitrary’ should count as informational. Arbitrariness has | ||
| + | an important role, however, in understanding the regulation of gene | ||
| + | expression via gene regulatory networks. Having defended our identification | ||
| + | of information with specificity, we show in the final section, ‘Distributed | ||
| + | Specificity’, that information is more widely distributed in biological systems | ||
| + | than is often supposed. Coding sequences of DNA are only one source of | ||
| + | biological specificity, and hence only one locus of biological information. | ||