The author applies the universal precepts of information theory to the communication system of DNA.

The informational nature of biological organization, at levels from the genetic and epigenetic to the cognitive and linguistic. Information shapes biological organization in fundamental ways and at every organizational level. Because organisms use information--including DNA codes, gene expression, and chemical signaling--to construct, maintain, repair, and replicate themselves, it would seem only natural to use information-related ideas in our attempts to understand the general nature of living systems, the causality by which they operate, the difference between living and inanimate matter, and the emergence, in some biological species, of cognition, emotion, and language. And yet philosophers and scientists have been slow to do so. This volume fills that gap. Information and Living Systems offers a collection of original chapters in which scientists and philosophers discuss the informational nature of biological organization at levels ranging from the genetic to the cognitive and linguistic. The chapters examine not only familiar information-related ideas intrinsic to the biological sciences but also broader information-theoretic perspectives used to interpret their significance. The contributors represent a range of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, chemistry, cognitive science, information theory, philosophy, psychology, and systems theory, thus demonstrating the deeply interdisciplinary nature of the volume's bioinformational theme.

This highly interdisciplinary book discusses the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution, against the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Among the central themes is the seeming contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics and the high degree of order and complexity produced by living systems. As the author shows, this paradox has its resolution in the information content of the Gibbs free energy that enters the biosphere from outside sources. Another focus of the book is the role of information in human cultural evolution, which is also discussed with the origin of human linguistic abilities. One of the final chapters addresses the merging of information technology and biotechnology into a new discipline — bioinformation technology.This third edition has been updated to reflect the latest scientific and technological advances. Professor Avery makes use of the perspectives of famous scholars such as Professor Noam Chomsky and Nobel Laureates John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edward Moser to cast light on the evolution of human languages. The mechanism of cell differentiation, and the rapid acceleration of information technology in the 21st century are also discussed.With various research disciplines becoming increasingly interrelated today, Information Theory and Evolution provides nuance to the conversation between bioinformatics, information technology, and pertinent social-political issues. This book is a welcome voice in working on the future challenges that humanity will face as a result of scientific and technological progress.

Publisher Description

Gregory Bateson’s contribution to 20th century thinking has appealed to scholars from a wide range of fields dealing in one way or another with aspects of communication and epistemology. A number of his insights were taken up and developed further in anthropology, psychology, evolutionary biology and communication theory. But the large, trans-disciplinary synthesis that, in his own mind, was his major contribution to science received little attention from the mainstream scientific communities. This book represents a major attempt to revise this deficiency. Scholars from ecology, biochemistry, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, anthropology and philosophy discuss how Bateson's thinking might lead to a fruitful reframing of central problems in modern science. Most important perhaps, Bateson's bioanthropology is shown to play a key role in developing the set of ideas explored in the new field of biosemiotics. The idea that organismic life is indeed basically semiotic or communicative lies at the heart of the biosemiotic approach to the study of life. The only book of its kind, this volume provides a key resource for the quickly-growing substratum of scholars in the biosciences, philosophy and medicine who are seeking an elegant new approach to exploring highly complex systems.

Now in paperback, James Grier Miller's groundbreaking Living Systems presents an integrated, multidisciplinary analysis of the nature of all biological and social systems.

The Living Systems Theory of Vocational Behavior and Development (LSVD) explains and illustrates the processes by which individuals construct their work experiences, vocational pathways and career patterns through episodes of interaction with affordances they recognize within their contexts, and how counseling can facilitate those processes. The LSVD was created by combining the scientifically based systems theory that explicates the dynamics of all aspects of human functioning and development, called Humans as Self-Constructing Living Systems, with important ideas about vocational behavior and development. The resulting integrative theory represents the individual person as a dynamic, self-directing and self-constructing entity, i.e., a living system. Behavior Episodes (BEs) are the fundamental, person-in-context, dynamic units of analysis that serve as the “building blocks” by which individuals construct and retain their experiences in patterns that can be reactivated to facilitate future BEs. The book describes how individuals’ history of satisfying BEs and their current activities provide the means by which vocational and career counselors can assist them to create satisfying vocational pathways. It also describes for researchers how new, non-linear, person-centered, quantitative and qualitative research methods can be used to analyze BE patterns to advance understanding of person-level processes that play key roles in individuals’ vocational behavior and development. The LSVD was designed to be not just an integrative framework for the field of career development, but also to reconnect the field to related areas such as human resources and industrial-organizational psychology and to the range of human sciences that have already embraced a living systems theoretical model.