The notion of information in biology, an appraisal

University Paris-IV, 2014/2015 on sabbatical, France

Abstract

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.