Information theory and vitalism. Reply to Hubert P. Yockey's letter (BioEssays 17, 85–88, 1995)
✍ Scribed by Shneior Lifson
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1995
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 133 KB
- Volume
- 17
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0265-9247
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In my review(') of Professor Yockey's book lnformation Theory and Molecular Biolog#2), I indicated that his views have much in common with vitalism, since he maintains that biological principles are not derivable from physics and chemistry alone, that the origin of life is 'inscrutable', that the life-message is 'non-material' and the 'sequence hypothesis' is an 'axiom'. Yockey responded with a passionate letter(3) that disagreed with my views, and this is understandable. Similarly, I disagree with the views expressed in his letter, and this is also understandable, since they are the same as those in his book. However, his letter is full of errors, of which I shall discuss only one. Yockey accused me of being myself a vitalist, which is not true. I think that the way he did it should not pass unchallenged. The following two examples, both taken from the first section of his letter, entitled 'Vitalism, meaning and semantics in information theory'@), should suffice to show why such ways are alien to scientific discourse.
- Yockey states: "The vitalism at the basis of Lifson's thought is clear when he writedl): '..
..the messages of interest in molecular biology are much more than just sequences of monomers. They contain all the biologically meaningful [emphasis Yockey's] aspects of human information that represent knowledge, learning, memory [emphasis Yockey's] and the like."'
The above quotation was obtained by omitting two halfsentences of mine and stitching together the remaining two half-sentences. It is a distorted, senseless statement, let alone that neither the distorted quotation nor the original have anything to do with vitalism.
My original statement was composed of two complementary parts. The second part, which was the source of Yockey's quotation, went originally as follows: "However, the messages of interest in molecular biology are much more than just sequences of monomers. They contain all the biologically meaningful aspects of genetic information that represent the purposeful organization of living cells and organisms. As such, they should be correlated with their corresponding meaningful aspects