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Biological Codes and Topological Causation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Benjamin Jantzen  and
David Danks
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Abstract

Various causal details of the genetic process of translation have been singled out to account for its privileged status as a ‘code’. We explicate the biological uses of coding talk by characterizing a class of special causal processes in which topological properties are the causally relevant ones. This class contains both the process of translation and communication theoretic coding processes as special cases. We propose a formalism in terms of graphs for expressing our theory of biological codes and discuss its utility in understanding biological systems.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , July 2008 , pp. 259 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

Portions of this article first appeared in Benjamin Jantzen's M.A. thesis. Thanks to Peter Spirtes and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. Frederick Eberhardt, Douglas Perkins, and Richard Yeh also provided valuable discussions and comments on earlier drafts.

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