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====== Stotz, K., Biological Information, Causality, and Specificity: An Intimate Relationship (2017) ======

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.
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