What the book say: What is information for molecular biology?

✍ Scribed by Shneior Lifson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1994
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 387 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0265-9247
• DOI: 10.1002/bies.950160513

✦ Synopsis

sentation(') which says, inter alia, 'The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning, that is they refer to or are correlated to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem'. Yockey relates this quotation to a statement that epitomizes his faulty reasoning with respect to biological information theory.

'One need only change the one word engineering to biological to make this paragraph apply to the application of information theory and coding theory in molecular biology. The messages of interest in molecular biology are those in the genome. There is a clear isomorphism between electronic communication systems and the genetic information system ...' (p. 60).