Abstract
Living cells and organisms can not only detect meaningful information but can also communicate it to other cells and organisms. Communication is a process in which one entity generates or displays a pattern of matter or energy that is detected by another and results in a change in the latter’s behavior, functioning, or structure, without a direct exchange of energy between them. Cues, signals, and messages are the different forms of meaningful information that can be exchanged between biological senders and receivers. The cells of multicellular organisms communicate with one another to coordinate their activities and regulate their functioning. Social animals use their long-distance senses of vision, hearing, and olfaction to transmit information to others and receive it from them. Although energy is required to transmit and respond to information, neither the nature of the information being transmitted nor the response it generates is related to the energy involved.
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Notes
- 1.
Notes
The field of Biosemiotics developed by Thomas Sebeok (1920–2001) involves the study of communicative signs in living systems. Semiotics, the discipline from which it is derived, is concerned primarily with understanding signification, rather than information. It regards all information as signs, which are conceptualized along lines pioneered by C. S. Peirce (1839–1914) as things that stand for something else, to someone, in some capacity. Biosemiotics applies concepts developed initially for understanding human communication to a range of biological phenomena, including genetic and cellular processes. However, because of its different orientation, the way it deals with these topics differs from the one proposed here. Information about Biosemiotics can be found in Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1992), Petrilli and Ponzio (2001), Barbieri (2003), and Barbieri (2006).
- 2.
The idea that signals and messages are different from cues because they (signals and messages) are intentionally generated is difficult to apply to entities that do not have conscious intentions. The approach taken here is that signals in organisms that lack conscious choice have been shaped by natural selection and are generated automatically. The meaning of cues, like storm clouds in the sky or brown patches in a lawn, is generally learned from the effects they produce.
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Hieroglyphics, notched sticks, and cave art were probably the first relatively lasting ways of transmitting information to recipients who were not physically present. The first commercial system for sending information over distances was the electric telegraph that Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail patented in 1837. Its messages were transmitted in “Morse Code,” a system that represents the alphabet by dots and dashes that are conveyed by electric currents of either short or long duration. The first long-distance voice transmission was sent over a copper wire between Washington and Baltimore in 1844, which was followed by Alexander Graham Bell’s introduction of the telephone in 1876. Wireless forms of transmission were then developed by Guglielmo Marconi in the late 1890s (Pierce 1980).
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Reading, A. (2011). Communication. In: Meaningful Information. SpringerBriefs in Biology, vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0158-2_10
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