Abstract
Commentary on Bergstrom and Rosvall, ‘The transmission sense of information’, Biology and Philosophy. In response to worries that uses of the concept of information in biology are metaphorical or insubstantial, Bergstrom and Rosvall have identified a sense in which DNA transmits information down the generations. Their ‘transmission view of information’ is founded on a claim about DNA’s teleofunction. Bergstrom and Rosvall see their transmission view of information as a rival to semantic accounts. This commentary argues that it is complementary. The idea that DNA is transmitting information down the generations only makes sense if it is carrying a message, that is to say if it has semantic content
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Notes
It seems that B&R intend this to be a necessary condition as well.
Following de Ruyter van Steveninck et al. (1997), B&R observe that calculating how much information is being carried does not depend upon knowing what the message is. However, it does require that you know what the semantically-significant coding elements are (the syntax, not the semantics, roughly). For example, de Ruyter van Steveninck et al. assumed that rate coding, rather than phase coding, say, was the bearer of relevant messages in the fly’s neurobiology.
That is an idealisation, since the code is also optimised by reference to errors that occur in individual development (e.g. frame-shift errors, ribosome “traffic congestion”). Such optimisation is only possible because, in every other way, the two synonymous codons impose very similar developmental costs.
References
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Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Carl Bergstrom for patient discussion of his view, and to Peter Godfrey-Smith for an extended dialogue on these issues over several years, including comments on this commentary. The research reported here was supported by the OUP John Fell Research Fund, the James Martin 21st Century School, the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.
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Shea, N. What’s transmitted? Inherited information.. Biol Philos 26, 183–189 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-010-9232-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-010-9232-4