The Sarkar challenge to biosemiotics: Is there any information in a cell?
| Abstract | This paper attempts to pose a question about the nature of "biological information" at its most basic level, seen from the perspectives of science, biosemiotics, and general semiotics. What has been called the central dogma of molecular biology is the idea that the genetic information flows only in one direction, from the genome to the biochemical activities in the cell. However, while this seems to presuppose a specific referential concept of information of some kind (or perhaps only a primitive one specifying sequences of chemical monomers). Such a concept does not seem to be well defined in molecular biology, and there are reasons to ask if there is any concept of 'semantic' information at this level of biology - or any clear concept of information at all. This 'Sarkar challenge' will be contrasted with the more visionary views of biosemiotics about the nature of information, communication and semiosis in living systems. Are we facing incompatible world views or just different paradigms? | |||||||||
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