Hostname: page-component-54dcc4c588-b5cpw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-09-18T17:11:56.460Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Information, Arbitrariness, and Selection: Comments on Maynard Smith

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Peter Godfrey-Smith
Peter Godfrey-Smith*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Stanford University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Maynard Smith is right that one of the most striking features of contemporary biology is the ever-increasing prominence of the concept of information, along with related concepts like representation, programming, and coding. Maynard Smith is also right that this is surely a phenomenon which philosophers of science should examine closely. We should try to understand exactly what sorts of theoretical commitment (if any) are made when biological systems are described in these terms, and what connection there is between semantic descriptions in biology and in other domains.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , June 2000 , pp. 202 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

†

Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2155.

References

Campbell, N., Reece, J., and Mitchell, L. (1999), Biology (5th ed.). Menlo Park: Addison Wesley.Google ScholarPubMed
Dretske, F. (1981), Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Godfrey-Smith, P. (2000). “On the Theoretical Role of ‘Genetic Coding’ “, Philosophy of Science 67: 26–44.10.1086/392760CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griffiths, P. and Gray, R. (1994), “Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation”, Journal of Philosophy 91: 277–304.10.2307/2940982CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knight, R. D., Freeland, S. J., and Landweber, L. F. (1999), “Selection, History and Chemistry: The Three Faces of the Genetic Code”, Trends in Biochemical Sciences 24: 241–247.10.1016/S0968-0004(99)01392-4CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shannon, C. (1948), “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Bell Systems Technical Journal 27: 279–423, 623–656.10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb00917.xCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sterelny, K., Smith, K., and Dickison, M. (1996), “The Extended Replicator”, Biology and Philosophy 11: 377–403.10.1007/BF00128788CrossRefGoogle Scholar