Metascience (2013) 22:379382 DOI 10.

1007/s11016-013-9803-5 BOOK REVIEW

The many faces of biological information

George Terzis and Robert Arp (eds): Information and living systems: Philosophical and scientic perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, xliii+414pp, $50, 34.95 HB
Barton Moffatt

Published online: 15 May 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

In Information and Living Systems: Philosophical and Scientic Perspectives, George Terzis and Robert Arp offer an interesting collection of papers that broaden the scope of the discussion of how informational ideas are relevant to understanding the natural world. Terzis and Arp begin with an introductory essay where they set out the rationale behind the book, arguing that there is a gap between the ubiquitous informational characterizations of biological organizations and information-based theorizing about the nature of living systems. This volume is an attempt to ll that gap by bringing together diverse, interdisciplinary informational accounts of biological systems. In addition, Terzis and Arp offer an excellent introduction to the thirteen collected papers, providing nice synopses and highlighting the many interrelations and differences between the papers.

Overview The volume is divided into three parts. Section I, The Denition of Life, contains two papers: The Need for a Universal Denition of Life in Twenty-rst-century Biology by Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo and Alvaro Moreno and Energy Coupling by Yasar Demirel. Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno argue that information is a central principle of biological organization and use it to propose a universal denition of life as a complex network of self-reproducing autonomous agents whose basic organization is instructed by material records generated through open-ended, historical process in which that collective evolves (16, italics in original). Demirel discusses information largely in terms of dynamical control and gives an account of

B. Moffatt (&) Department of Philosophy and Religion, Mississippi State University, PO Box JS, Mississippi State, MS 39759, USA e-mail: bmoffatt@philrel.msstate.edu

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the thermodynamics of biological systems in an interesting, albeit somewhat technical, paper. Section II, Information and Biological Organization, is the largest section, with six papers: Bioinformation as a Triadic Relation by Alfredo Marcos; The o Biosemiotic Approach in Biology: Theoretical Bases and Applied Models by Joa Queiroz, Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull and Charbel El-Hani; Problem Solving in the Life Cycles of Multicellular Organisms: Immunology and Cancer by Niall Shanks and Rebecca A. Pyles; The Informational Nature of Biological Causality by Alvaro Moreno and Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo; The Self-construction of a Living pez-Moratalla and Mar a Cerezo; and Plasticity and Organism by Natalia Lo Complexity in Biology: Topological Organization, Regulatory Protein Networks, and Mechanisms of Genetic Expression by Luciano Boi. Marcos disambiguates multiple senses of biological information and offers up an excellent account of biological information in terms of a three-part relation between a message, receiver and a system of reference. Emmeche, Kull and El-Hani provide a masterful overview of the well-developed biosemiotic perspective, in which biological information is understood as a sign-object-interpretant triad. Moreno and RuizMirazo return with a second contribution in which they argue that the causal structure of cellular organization is importantly informational, linking selfpreserving and self-replicating domains. Shanks and Pyles explore the role of information in adaptive problem solving and offer two excellent case studies pezhighlighting the role signals play in immunology and cancer research. Lo Moratalla and Cerezo use genetic and epigenetic information to model an organisms biological identity and individuality as a self-constructed thing in a really nice paper. After a detailed survey of the emerging importance of epigenetic factors, Boi suggests that we need to rethink biological information in light of these advances. The last section, Information and the Biology of Cognition, Value, and Language, shifts focus to more cognitive concerns and contains ve papers: Decision Making in the Economy of Nature: Value as Information by Benoit e; Information Theory and Perception: The Role of Constraints, and Hardy-Valle What Do We Maximize Information About? by Roland Baddeley, Benjamin Vincent and David Attewell; Attention, Information, and Epistemic Perception by Nicolas J. Bullot; Biolinguistics and Information by Cedric Boeckx and Juan Figueredo, W. Jake Uriagereka; and The Biology of Personality by Aurelio Jose e Jacobs, Sarah B. Burger, Paul R. Gladden and Sally G. Olderbak. The Hardy-Valle contribution introduces an interesting, value-based account of information and uses it to explain biological decision making. Baddeley, Vincent and Attewell use information theory to model edge-detection in vision. Bullot argues that causal information is the key to understanding the link between attention and perceptual knowledge. Boeckx and Uriagereka discuss three ways in which biolinguistics and information theory intersect. Finally, Figueredo, Jacobs, Burger, Gladden and Olderbak recast ShannonWeaver information in terms of constraint and argue that understanding the nature of these constraints reveals key aspects of behavioral development.

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Strengths The best thing about this collection is the quality of the papers and the inclusion of a broadly diverse set of perspectives. Too often academic debates are articially restricted to a discussion of a narrow set of views and positions. Here, each contribution takes a largely distinct view on the nature of biological information or uses differing informational concepts to explain diverse sets of biological phenomena. Information theorizing is put to use in exploring a fascinating array of living processes and phenomena. Interestingly, there is even diversity in the scope of explanations, as sometimes informational theorizing is used to explain some feature of living systems while at other times it is the thing to be explained. The real payoff of the volumes breadth is the inclusion of papers that span the elds of biology and cognitive science/psychology and linguistics. It is quite helpful to see how different the same basic issues appear when discussed next to similar issues in varying contexts and domains.

Who should read this book and why? For scholars theorizing about information elements of life, this volume is immensely useful. Its strength is the diversity of information theoretical approaches which allows scientists and philosophers interested in applying informational models to explain the behavior of natural systems to see the paths that their fellow travelers have taken. I would say that the book is a must read for folks in that camp. I would also recommend it for people who, although not committed to a particular theoretical perspective, are curious about exploring these kinds of approaches. The only caveat I would note is that some of the papers are written at a fairly high technical level despite the inclusion of a good deal of helpful background and scene setting. The references alone should be highly useful for people in search of a methodology. I suspect that this book is bound to be a bit of a frustrating read for skeptics of information talk in the life sciences. Obviously, this is not the intended reading audience. While many papers are admirably clear about what counts as biological information and why, some are less so, which occasionally leads the reader wondering what exactly is meant by information in a given context or if a given phenomenon is necessarily informational. The downside of organizing the collection around the need to theorize about underexplored informational aspects of living systems is that it presumes that nature is genuinely informational, which eliminates the need to justify a given account as necessarily informational. I would have found more discussion in each chapter of why it is necessary to take an informational approach to explain the target phenomenon to be very helpful. However, this is not to say that there is no value here for the skeptic of theorizing about information in the life sciences. At the very least, this collection contains an eye opening group of distinct informational models and explanations, which should prove more grist for the skeptics mill. In a similar vein, this book is a bit of a mixed bag for philosophers interested in relatively narrow questions about the

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metaphysical and epistemological status of informational concepts in the life sciences. There are a couple of excellent chapters that deal primarily with these issues, but most of the book has a broader focus and is aimed more at using informational concepts to explain aspects of living systems.

Final thoughts This book is an excellent addition to the literature on information and living systems. In addition to serving as a template for current and future research, this selection of papers also raises a host of interesting and productive questions. First, what is information and how are the varied informational concepts related? It is not entirely clear, even after reading the volume, what the varied conceptions of information all have in common. Second, how are we to judge if an account is successful? Do informational models of living systems need to be shown to be coherent, sufcient, or perhaps, even necessary? In other words, if we grant that all of the informational accounts are at least coherent and plausible, which ones actually capture the relevant biological processes? Is it enough to simply provide an information account of a biological phenomenon, or is greater proof required before we accept that a given account is true? Broader questions aside, if you think that the key to understanding lifes systems and processes is the application of information concepts this is just the book for you.

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