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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
Línea 1: Línea 1:
-====== 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
 +
 +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.
proyectos/tfg/bibliografia/stotz2017.1509095198.txt.gz · Última modificación: 2017/11/08 02:18 (editor externo)