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Information, Arbitrariness, and Selection: Comments on Maynard Smith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Peter Godfrey-Smith*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Stanford University
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Extract

Maynard Smith is right that one of the most striking features of contemporary biology is the ever-increasing prominence of the concept of information, along with related concepts like representation, programming, and coding. Maynard Smith is also right that this is surely a phenomenon which philosophers of science should examine closely. We should try to understand exactly what sorts of theoretical commitment (if any) are made when biological systems are described in these terms, and what connection there is between semantic descriptions in biology and in other domains.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 202 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2155.

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