Abstract
The question of whether “genetic information” is a merely causal factor in development or can be made sense of semantically, in a way analogous to a language or other type of representation, has generated a long debate in the philosophy of biology. It is intimately connected with another intense debate, concerning the limits of genetic determinism. In this paper I argue that widespread attempts to draw analogies between genetic information and information contained in books, blueprints or computer programs, are fundamentally inadequate. In development, gene exons are the central part of an intricate and densely ramified semantic Genetic Informational Network. DNA in the entire genome is in a state of continuous positive and negative feedback with itself and with its ‘environment’, and is ‘read’ and acted upon by the cell in various alternative and complementary ways. The linear combinatorial coding relation between codons and amino acids is but one aspect of semantic genetic information, which is, when considered in its entirety, a far wider and richer concept.
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Notes
The statements in this paragraph and the next do not necessarily present “Option B” or the motivations behind it in the way Godfrey-Smith himself would. They rather represent my own rationale for endorsing it as a starting point in what follows.
As we now know, the prokaryotic genome also has intricacies that make the ‘interpretation’ of its DNA sequence non-straightforward. This fact strengthens rather than undermines Sarkar’s general point about the inadequacy of a simplistic view of genetic information.
I owe to an anonymous referee the suggestion that declarative programming may be a more relevant analogy for genetic information. Perhaps not incidentally, the use of declarative programming for artificial intelligence applications is an active and promising area of research. The analogy should be drawn with some circumspection, however, as the notion of declarative programming may, in the present context, conjure up quite unpalatable connotations of “intelligent design”.
Prions are still an open case in this respect: although misfolding of the PrP protein and the subsequent propagation of the misfolded variant (Pan et al., 1993) is thought to be truly extra-genetic, some genetic polymorphisms are nevertheless associated with varying susceptibility to that propagation (Belt et al., 1995).
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Thanks are due to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and to Professor S. Virvidakis of the University of Athens for continuous encouragement.
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Saridakis, E. The genetic informational network: how DNA conveys semantic information. HPLS 43, 112 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00470-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-021-00470-y