The most significant legacy of philosophical skepticism is the realization that our concepts, beliefs and theories are social constructs. This belief has led to epistemological relativism, or the thesis that since there is no ultimate truth about the world, theory preferences are only a matter of opinion. In this book, William Harms seeks to develop the conceptual foundations and tools for a science of knowledge through the application of evolutionary theory, thus allowing us to acknowledge the legacy of skepticism while denying its relativistic offspring.
No one can escape a sense of wonder when looking at an organism from within. From the humblest amoeba to man, from the smallest cell organelle to the amazing human brain, life presents us with example after example of highly ordered cellular matter, precisely organized and shaped to perform coordinated functions. But where does this order spring from? How does a living organism manage to do what nonliving things cannot do--bring forth and maintain all that order against the unrelenting, disordering pressures of the universe?
In The Touchstone of Life, world-renowned biophysicist Werner Loewenstein seeks answers to these ancient riddles by applying information theory to recent discoveries in molecular biology. Taking us into a fascinating microscopic world, he lays bare an all-pervading communication network inside and between our cells--a web of extraordinary beauty, where molecular information flows in gracefully interlaced circles. Loewenstein then takes us on an exhilarating journey along that web and we meet its leading actors, the macromolecules, and see how they extract order out of the erratic quantum world; and through the powerful lens of information theory, we are let in on their trick, the most dazzling of magician's acts, whereby they steal form out of formlessness.
The Touchstone of Life flashes with fresh insights into the mystery of life. Boldly straddling the line between biology and physics, the book offers a breathtaking view of that hidden world where molecular information turns the wheels of life. Loewenstein makes these complex scientific subjects lucid and fascinating, as he sheds light on the most fundamental aspects of our existence.
This highly interdisciplinary book discusses the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution (and also human cultural evolution), against the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Among the central themes is the seeming contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics and the high degree of order and complexity produced by living systems. This paradox has its resolution in the information content of the Gibbs free energy that enters the biosphere from outside sources, as the author shows. The role of information in human cultural evolution is another focus of the book. One of the final chapters discusses the merging of information technology and biotechnology into a new discipline — bio-information technology.
Information Theory, Evolution and the Origin of Life presents a timely introduction to the use of information theory and coding theory in molecular biology. The genetical information system, because it is linear and digital, resembles the algorithmic language of computers. George Gamow pointed out that the application of Shannon's information theory breaks genetics and molecular biology out of the descriptive mode into the quantitative mode and Dr Yockey develops this theme, discussing how information theory and coding theory can be applied to molecular biology. He discusses how these tools for measuring the information in the sequences of the genome and the proteome are essential for our complete understanding of the nature and origin of life. The author writes for the computer competent reader who is interested in evolution and the origins of life.
A new study by Noam Sobel, of the Olfaction Research Group at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and others are reporting in the journal Science this week that men in their study who sniffed the tears of crying women produced less testosterone and found female faces less arousing.
Previous studies in animals such as mice and mole rats have shown that tears convey important chemical messages which are used to attract or repel others of the same species. There is good evidence for an interesting type means of higher-level chemical communication. These previous studies also incidentally show that “emotional” tears are chemically distinct from “eye-protecting” types of tears.
Scientific American’s “60 Second Science” (via link or listen below) podcast has a good audio overview of the study for those without the time to read the paper.
In press reports, Adam Anderson, a University of Toronto psychologist who was not involved with the study, posited that the results may imply that “tears have some influence on sexual selection, and that’s not something we associate with sadness.” He continued, “It could be a way of warding off unwanted advances.”
This study provides a new hypothesis for the evolution of crying in humans. (Now if only we could find some better reasons for laughter…)
The take home message may be that guys should not take their dates out to weepy chick flicks, or alternately women reluctantly accepting “pity dates” should force their suitors to exactly these types of testosterone damping films.
The transmission of genomic information from coding sequence to protein structure during protein synthesis is subject to stochastic errors. To analyze transmission limits in the presence of spurious errors, Shannon's noisy channel theorem is applied to a communication channel between amino acid sequences and their structures established from a large-scale statistical analysis of protein atomic coordinates. While Shannon's theorem confirms that in close to native conformations information is transmitted with limited error probability, additional random errors in sequence (amino acid substitutions) and in structure (structural defects) trigger a decrease in communication capacity toward a Shannon limit at 0.010 bits per amino acid symbol at which communication breaks down. In several controls, simulated error rates above a critical threshold and models of unfolded structures always produce capacities below this limiting value. Thus an essential biological system can be realistically modeled as a digital communication channel that is (a) sensitive to random errors and (b) restricted by a Shannon error limit. This forms a novel basis for predictions consistent with observed rates of defective ribosomal products during protein synthesis, and with the estimated excess of mutual information in protein contact potentials.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003110
In the simplest view of transcriptional regulation, the expression of a gene is turned on or off by changes in the concentration of a transcription factor (TF). We use recent data on noise levels in gene expression to show that it should be possible to transmit much more than just one regulatory bit. Realizing this optimal information capacity would require that the dynamic range of TF concentrations used by the cell, the input/output relation of the regulatory module, and the noise in gene expression satisfy certain matching relations, which we derive. These results provide parameter-free, quantitative predictions connecting independently measurable quantities. Although we have considered only the simplified problem of a single gene responding to a single TF, we find that these predictions are in surprisingly good agreement with recent experiments on the Bicoid/Hunchback system in the early Drosophila embryo and that this system achieves ∼90% of its theoretical maximum information transmission. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0806077105
To understand the structure of a large-scale biological, social, or technological network, it can be helpful to decompose the network into smaller subunits or modules. In this article, we develop an information-theoretic foundation for the concept of modularity in networks. We identify the modules of which the network is composed by finding an optimal compression of its topology, capitalizing on regularities in its structure. We explain the advantages of this approach and illustrate them by partitioning a number of real-world and model networks.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0611034104
Information theory in biology by Henry Quastler, Editor. 1953. 273 pp. Urbana: University of Illinois Press
There are two kinds of scientific books worth reading. One is the monograph or treatise type, in which a more or less large field of science is presented in a systematic way, and in the
form of a product as finished as possible at the given time. This kind of book may be considered a source of knowledge then available. The other type of book may present a collection of
chapters or individual articles which do not claim to be a complete and systematic treatment of the subject; however the reader not only finds interesting ideas there, but the reading as
such suggests new ideas. Such books are useful. For, although a rough and unfinished idea per se does not even remotely have the value of a well-elaborated scientific study, yet no elaborate
study, no important theory, can be developed without first having a few rough ideas.
The book under consideration definitely belongs to the second category: it is a collection of essays. As the editor states in the Introduction (p. 2) : "The papers in this volume are of a very
different degree of maturity. They range from authoritative reviews of well-known facts to hesitant and tentative formulations of embryonic ideas." He further states (p. 3): "We are
aware of the fact that this volume is largely exploratory."
If the above is to be considered as a shortcoming, then the reviewer does not need to dwell on it, because the editor, and undoubtedly the authors, are fully aware of it, and duly warn
the reader. If we evaluate the book from the point of view of how many ideas it suggests to the reader, then, at least so far as this reviewer is concerned, it must be considered a great success.
Background: Elucidating gene regulatory networks is crucial for understanding normal cell physiology and complex pathologic phenotypes. Existing computational methods for the genome-wide ``reverse engineering'' of such networks have been successful only for lower eukaryotes with simple genomes. Here we present ARACNE, a novel algorithm, using microarray expression profiles, specifically designed to scale up to the complexity of regulatory networks in mammalian cells, yet general enough to address a wider range of network deconvolution problems. This method uses an information theoretic approach to eliminate the majority of indirect interactions inferred by co-expression methods.
Results: We prove that ARACNE reconstructs the network exactly (asymptotically) if the effect of loops in the network topology is negligible, and we show that the algorithm works well in practice, even in the presence of numerous loops and complex topologies. We assess ARACNE's ability to reconstruct transcriptional regulatory networks using both a realistic synthetic dataset and a microarray dataset from human B cells. On synthetic datasets ARACNE achieves very low error rates and outperforms established methods, such as Relevance Networks and Bayesian Networks. Application to the deconvolution of genetic networks in human B cells demonstrates ARACNE's ability to infer validated transcriptional targets of the c MYC proto-oncogene. We also study the effects of mis estimation of mutual information on network reconstruction, and show that algorithms based on mutual information ranking are more resilient to estimation errors.
MOTIVATION:
Traditional sequence distances require an alignment and therefore are not directly applicable to the problem of whole genome phylogeny where events such as rearrangements make full length alignments impossible. We present a sequence distance that works on unaligned sequences using the information theoretical concept of Kolmogorov complexity and a program to estimate this distance.
RESULTS:
We establish the mathematical foundations of our distance and illustrate its use by constructing a phylogeny of the Eutherian orders using complete unaligned mitochondrial genomes. This phylogeny is consistent with the commonly accepted one for the Eutherians. A second, larger mammalian dataset is also analyzed, yielding a phylogeny generally consistent with the commonly accepted one for the mammals.
AVAILABILITY:
The program to estimate our sequence distance, is available at http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~cssamk/gencomp/GenCompress1.htm. The distance matrices used to generate our phylogenies are available at http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~mli/distance.html.