Information as a Manifestation of Development

Abstract

Information manifests a reduction in uncertainty or indeterminacy. As such it can emerge in two ways: by measurement, which involves the intentional choices of an observer; or more generally, by development, which involves systemically mutual ('self-organizing') processes that break symmetry. The developmental emergence of information is most obvious in ontogeny, but pertains as well to the evolution of ecosystems and abiotic dissipative structures. In this review, a seminal, well-characterized ontogenetic paradigm-the sea urchin embryo-is used to show how cybernetic causality engenders the developmental emergence of biological information at multiple hierarchical levels of organization. The relevance of information theory to developmental genomics is also discussed.

Downward causation by information control in micro-organisms

“…While there are different kinds of information, it can generally be defined as that which brings about a reduction of uncertainty or indeterminacy [33,34]. An anticipated characteristic of all master functions is that they are functional cyclic networks.…”

On the Meaning of Chance in Biology

“…Similar phenomenology also obtains in systems at higher levels of organization (such as ecosystems and human economies; Ulanowicz 1986, 1997, 2009; Coffman 2006, 2011a), in which development results in progressively constraining circumstances that reduce the degrees of freedom (i.e. diversity of chances) afforded players within the system.…”

“…The transformation of a tendency (or propensity) into a mature habit occurs via development (growth and self-organization), essentially by way of the phenomenology articulated by Ulanowicz (Ulanowicz 1986, 1997; Coffman 2006; Ulanowicz 2009) and Salthe (1993). In this scheme information manifests prior development (Coffman 2011a), and any form of knowledge can then be said to be the product of an anticipatory habit emerging from a congruent relation that develops between an embodied system of interpretance with rapid dynamics (e.g. an organism, or a cell) and its more slowly changing environment (von Uexkull’s ‘Umwelt’—Salthe, this issue), i.e., what Robert Rosen referred to as a modeling relation (Rosen 1985, 1991; also discussed by Salthe 1993).…”

“…Thus, it appears that in organismal development, immature stages with high regenerative capacity are generally more open to chance expression of genomically encoded information. With the advent of modern DNA sequencing technology this can now be readily tested by quantifying the informational entropy of the transcribed genome (‘transcriptional entropy’) (Coffman 2011a). Although this approach has not yet been widely applied, the prediction is that when it is, it will show that cell differentiation invariably entails a progressive reduction of transcriptional entropy.…”