The notion of information in biology, an appraisal
Résumé
Developed during the first half of the 20th century, in three different fields, theoretical physics, statistics applied to agronomy and telecommunication engineering, the notion of information has become a scientific concept in the context of the Second War World. It is in this highly interdisciplinary environment that " information theory " emerged, combining the mathematical theory of communication and cybernetics. This theory has grown exponentially in many disciplines, including biology. The discovery of the genetic " code " has benefited from the development of a common language based on information theory and has fostered a almost imperialist development of molecular genetics, which culminated in the Human Genome Project. This project however could not fill all the raised expectations and epigenetics have shown the limits of this approach. Still, the theory of information continues to be applied in the current research, whether the application of the self-correcting coding theory to explain the conservation of genomes on a geological scale or aspects the theory of evolution. In a comment published in October 2014 in the well-known journal Nature, specialists of evolutionary theory discussed with " point " and " counterpoint " whether their field needed a complete rethink or not [1]. The advocates of a theoretical change stated: " We hold that organisms are constructed in development, not simply " programmed " to develop by genes. Living things do not evolve to fit into pre-existing environments, but co-construct and coevolve with their environments, in the process changing the structure of ecosystems. " On the online version of the paper, David Tyler from the Cell Biology Department of the University of Valencia made this insightful remark: " It seems to me that the key issues relate to biological information and the word 'evolution' needs to be defined in a way that does justice to the origin (or loss) of information. " In the same vein, a geneticist like Antoine Danchin worked on the links between the reproduction of cells and the replication of genomes, in relation to ageing [2]. He came to the conclusion that " making young structures from aged ones implies creating information " and added " I revisit Information Theory, showing that the laws of physics permit de novo creation of information, provided an energy-dependent process preserving functional entities makes room for entities accumulating information. " Information seems to appear a central notion, next to matter, energy, time and mass. In the last couple of years scientists like Vedral or Battail respectively tried to reinterpret physics or biology putting the notion of information at the core or their approach [3, 4]. What can be the place of historians in such a contemporary scientific discussion? The lack of hindsight make it from the beginning a very difficult task to undertake. Most of those who recognized themselves as historians will officially consider that assessing the value of current scientific research does definitively not belong to their goals. Marc Bloch, the father of the famous Annales school, This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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