The representation, quantification, and nature of genetic information
Permanent lenke
https://hdl.handle.net/10037/34940Dato
2024-06-27Type
Journal articleTidsskriftartikkel
Peer reviewed
Sammendrag
Current genetics studies often refer to notions from information science. The purpose
of this paper is to summarize and structure the different notions of information used in
biology, as a step towards developing a taxonomy of information. Within this framework we propose an extension of Floridi’s conceptual model of information. We also
make use of the concept of specified information and show that functional information
and many other notions of information are either special cases of, or are closely related
to, specified information. Since functionality of the proteins that genes code serves
as an external and independent specification, this makes it possible to define genetic
information in a way that includes semantic aspects. In particular, we discuss how to
understand the qualitative aspects of genetic information, how to measure its quantitative aspects, and how variants of Shannon’s information measure can be applied to
molecular sequence data of protein families. While a mathematical framework may
not be able to incorporate all that is included within biological information, some
aspects of it allow for statistical modelling. This is especially true if we restrict our
focus on the discipline of genetics. The concept of genetic information is still disputed
because it attributes semantic traits to what seems to be regular biochemical entities.
Some researchers maintain that the use of information in biology is just metaphorical and may even be misleading. We argue that the foundation of the metaphorical
view is relatively weak given the current findings in bioinformatics and show that the
present understanding of genetics fits well into the context of the modern philosophy
of information. The paper concludes that informational concepts have robust scientific
applications at the level of genes.
Forlag
Springer NatureSitering
Thorvaldsen, Øhrstrøm, Hössjer. The representation, quantification, and nature of genetic information. Synthese. 2024Metadata
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