Is genetic information irreducible?

✍ Scribed by Phillip E. Johnson

• Book ID: 104637455
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 233 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0169-3867
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00138331

✦ Synopsis

In his 1992 book Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges, George C. Williams stated that organisms consist of two separate domains, which Williams called the "material" and the "codical." The former is the domain of chemistry, including particularly the nucleotides of DNA and their chemical components. The codical domain consists of non-material information. The information encoded in DNA is fundamentally distinct from the chemical medium in which the information is recorded, just as the information conveyed in a book is fundamentally distinct from the ink and paper on which it is printed.

Williams explicitly invoked this analogy between biology and literature: