Abstract
Deacon presents a fascinating model that adds to explanations of the origins of life from physical matter. Deacon’s paper owes much to the work of Howard Pattee, who saw semiotic relations in informational terms, and Deacon binds his model to criticism of current information concepts in biology which he sees as semantically inadequate. In this commentary I first outline the broader project from Pattee, and then I present a cybernetic perspective on information. My claim is that this view of information is already present within biology and provides what Deacon seeks.
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Notes
Here I am using system and context interchangeably.
I am indebted to the editor and an anonymous reviewer for raising these concerns.
See also Dickins, T.E. (Forthcoming.) The Modern Synthesis: Evolution and the organization of information. Springer.
And to the best of my knowledge no one in fact does this. Instead, the tendency in evolutionary biology is to associate a colloquial view of information with the gene as an analogy, with no formal commitment to a theory of information. This is not a theory of information, and as an analogy allows only one direction of epistemic travel. This works, but only within limits (Maynard Smith, 2000).
We should remember that his main assumption is that replicator views of information disposed of the concept of aboutness. He laid this at Dawkins’ door, which I hope to have dissuaded the reader from committing to, but in my parse of information and data I did note that data are not about anything. This was in order to place the burden of information on the functional relationship between data and context. This may be where Deacon is heading, but I don’t want him to ride the back of straw biologist.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Paul Cobley, the editor and an anonymous reviewer for critical and useful engagement with a draft of this commentary. They have improved it, but all errors remain my own. I declare no conflicts of interest and that I received no funding to support this work.
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Dickins, T.E. Data and Context. Biosemiotics 14, 633–642 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09454-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09454-8