Griffiths Paul E
Department of Philosophy and Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia.
Interface Focus. 2017 Oct 6;7(5):20160152. doi: 10.1098/rsfs.2016.0152. Epub 2017 Aug 18.
The idea that development is the expression of information accumulated during evolution and that heredity is the transmission of this information is surprisingly hard to cash out in strict, scientific terms. This paper seeks to do so using the sense of information introduced by Francis Crick in his sequence hypothesis and central dogma of molecular biology. It focuses on Crick's idea of precise determination. This is analysed using an information-theoretic measure of causal specificity. This allows us to reconstruct some of Crick's claims about information in transcription and translation. Crick's approach to information has natural extensions to non-coding regions of DNA, to epigenetic marks, and to the genetic or environmental upstream causes of those epigenetic marks. Epigenetic information cannot be reduced to genetic information. The existence of biological information in epigenetic and exogenetic factors is relevant to evolution as well as to development.
认为发育是进化过程中积累的信息的表达，而遗传是这种信息的传递，这一观点出人意料地难以用严格的科学术语来阐释清楚。本文试图运用弗朗西斯·克里克在其序列假说和分子生物学中心法则中引入的信息概念来做到这一点。它聚焦于克里克的精确决定论观点。运用因果特异性的信息论度量对此进行分析。这使我们能够重构克里克关于转录和翻译中信息的一些主张。克里克的信息方法自然地扩展到DNA的非编码区域、表观遗传标记以及那些表观遗传标记的遗传或环境上游成因。表观遗传信息不能简化为遗传信息。表观遗传和外遗传因素中生物信息的存在与进化以及发育都相关。
