Table Of ContentInformation, The Hidden Side of Life
“In the beginning was the Word...”
John 1:1
New International Version
Series Editor
Jean-Charles Pomerol
Information,
The Hidden Side of Life
Cédric Gaucherel
Pierre-Henri Gouyon
Jean-Louis Dessalles
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018960339
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-424-7
Contents
Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxiii
Chapter 1. Human and Animal Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.1. Language, that amazing thing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2. The mechanics of language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3. What is syntax? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
1.4. Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.5. Beyond meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
1.6. Non-human languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
1.7. Types of language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
1.8. Why give information? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
1.9. The autonomy of information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
1.10. Language and information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Chapter 2. Genetic Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.1. A central concept in biology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.2. Epigenetic information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.3. The environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.4. Information: from replication to reproduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.5. Mutation and selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
2.6. The story of the message: phylogeny and coalescence . . . . . . . . . . 52
vi Information, The Hidden Side of Life
2.7. The point of view of the reading system . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
2.8. We cannot see the wood for the trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
2.9. The tree and the web … and some complexities there! . . . . . . . . . . 64
2.10. When information and individual can no longer be confused . . . . . . 66
2.11. Conflicts and levels of integration: avatars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
2.12. Sociobiology, altruism and information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
2.13. The “all genetics” versus epigenetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
2.14. What is Life? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Chapter 3. Ecosystem and Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.1. An information-centered perspective of the ecosystem . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.2. Reservoirs of ecosystemic information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
3.3. Biodiversity: an ecosystem made up of individuals . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
3.4. Phylogeny of communities: biology in the arena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
3.5. The ecosystem: a physical system or a biological system? . . . . . . . . 92
3.6. An ecosystem made up of matter and energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
3.7. Failure of the physical approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
3.8. Physics has not said its last word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
3.9. The great challenges of ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
3.10. Flow and balance of ecosystemic information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
3.11. Ecosystemic codes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
3.12. The languages of the ecosystem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Chapter 4. Can We Define Information? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
4.1. Information as surprise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
4.2. Information measured by complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
4.3. Information as organized complexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
4.4. Information as compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
4.5. Coding and information reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
4.6. Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Chapter 5. Evolution of Information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
5.1. In the beginning was structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
5.2. The first languages were ecosystemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
5.3. The replicators and the conservators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152
5.4. Biological languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
5.5. Information selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
5.6. Messages and languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
5.7. The complexification of codes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Contents vii
5.8. Complexification of languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
5.9. The re-creation of life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
5.10. And what about tomorrow? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
Preface
“The reader of this sentence will cease to
exist when he has finished reading.”
Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter
This book grew out of a meeting that brought together three scientists,
who had different backgrounds, and who worked in different disciplines, but
who all had this in common: their activities had to do with the living entity.
Confronting each of them in their own way was the question: what is
information?
Whether in ecosystems, human language, genetics or evolution of living
organisms, one comes face to face with the idea that information forms the
substance of the system(s) being studied, then reproduced, transmitted,
coded and decoded, or manipulated in other ways. Such information may not
be equally important to everyone, it may not be carried by the same channel,
or perhaps even be of the same nature. Yet, one cannot afford to overlook
the importance of the concept while continuing to speak of it without a
proper understanding of what the much-used term means. The information
that we exchange and talk about every day is coded in our language. Now,
are other languages coded differently, say nature’s languages? Can we define
them, analyze them and quantify them?
Quite possibly, part of what we are going to say here may appear obvious
to some readers, but unacceptable to others. Considering the gap between
these two reactions, however, it is reassuring that we come across both kinds
of comment, perhaps in a sign that there is something non-consensual behind
x Information, The Hidden Side of Life
seemingly mundane ideas. Now, we are not quite done with this theme yet,
and, in fact, this is going to open up further vistas of thinking. We hope that
the publication of this essay will make possible an elaboration of the issue,
and lead to fruitful discussions with those who find these questions
interesting.
One difficulty that appears immediately pertinent has to do with the very
nature of information. Is it material or is it not? The answer: while the
channels used in transmitting it are material, information itself is not
material.
Well, this is only the first of our difficulties. Our science does not readily
accept non-material entities. Let us not forget that the absence of materiality
was a major argument in the rejection of Newton’s theory: the force of
gravity appeared quite esoteric, since the force is acting at a distance,
without material support. In contrast, the solar turbulences mentioned by
Descartes appeared to be much more real or tangible. Yet, while following
the same Aristotelian line of thinking, up to the end of the 18th Century, it
seemed reasonable to consider fire an element, to the point of giving it a
name: phlogiston. A process received the status of matter through a
distortion of reality. It was left to the times of Lavoisier to demonstrate the
difference between a material entity and a chemical reaction, and thereby to
bring to an end a misconception that had persisted for over 2,000 years.
Let us rid ourselves of this obsessive habit of seeing everything in terms
of matter. Information, even though carried by material agents, is
nevertheless different from them. Now, how can a non-material entity act on
matter? While trying to resolve this apparent paradox, we need to remember
that, while information is certainly non-material, it is active across channels
of communication, themselves material.
Does not Léo Ferré, in his Il n’y a plus rien (“There’s Nothing Any
More”), praise the non-material virtues of information?
“Peddle your ideas like drugs… You risk nothing at the borders. Nothing
in your hands, nothing in your pockets, it’s all there in your head!
‘Anything to declare?’
‘Nothing!’
Preface xi
‘What is your name?’
‘Karl Marx.’
‘All right. Move on!’”
Indeed, Karl Marx probably produced nothing other than information. He
bore no arms, raised no army. For all that, for this generation of ours, having
lived in a world split into two blocs, through nuclear horror and the wars that
raged from Vietnam to Nicaragua and Cuba and Afghanistan, and that
reshaped (and continue to reshape) the geopolitical environment, how
materially influential this information of Marx’s has been.
While we (the three scientists) were still getting to know one another, one
of us expressed to Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond his desire to work on the
concept of information. “Is that a concept?” he had asked. Indeed,
information is not yet a concept. Could we build one out of it?
Cédric GAUCHEREL
Pierre-Henri GOUYON
Jean-Louis DESSALES
October 2018
