Why Information Biology?

Why not bioinformatics, or computational biology, or systems biology? Information Biology is the phrase that best fits my own particular slant on computation and living systems. I was captured at an early age by the realization that DNA and proteins can be beautifully summarized as strings of alphabetic characters. This now common place representation still amazes me.

Bateson defined information best: news of difference that makes a difference. For information to exist, there must always be an entity to sense and care about differences. The world of the living is a place "... where distinctions are drawn and differences can be a cause", which is to say where information is used.

Shannon, in describing how to measure information, was careful to note that "semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem", ie he avoided completely the question of meaning. In his definition the quantity of information obtainable on receipt of a single message is proportional to the number of equipropable messages that could have been sent. If only two such messages are possible, receipt of one offers the smallest possible piece of information. Note the clear differentiation of possible quantity of information from actual information. Shannon talks about how much information could be sent, not whether the message was meaningful. From the engineering perspective it doesn't matter. Unfortunately, after this careful beginning, first Shannon and then most others have used the word information to refer to this quantitative capacity for transmitting or holding meaningful information. Too bad!

Many if not most references to information are hopelessly confused due to the failure to distinguish Bateson's meaningful information from Shannon's capacity for information, resulting eventually in the sad occurrence of such oxymorons as "useless information" or "information overload" . While it's alright to call a pint of beer a pint, since no one will confuse a unit of liquid measure for a refreshing beverage, it's quite a different story with differences that make a difference as opposed to the ability to write them down in one place. No one can see the difference between a zeroed hard drive and one filled with an entire collection of music or all the secrets to the construction of advanced weapons, but the difference is real. The size of the drive determines the amount of music or number of secrets that can be stored, but of doesn't indicate whether they are there - this should be as obvious as the pint and the beer, and yet it is often and profoundly ignored in common discussion. There should really be two words, one for Bateson's information (the music and the secrets), and one for Shannon's (the size of the hard drive), but at present we have only one. Readers beware!