PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

C I Stuart

Publications and source records attributed to C I Stuart.

4 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1985

Bio-informational equivalence.

Combined, the ideas of modern genetics and those of evolutionary process form the central explanatory concepts of biological science. Over the past 30 years or so, those concepts have merged with the idea that biological processes--at every level of organization--are equivalent to information transactions. The latter idea is here called the concept of bio-informational equivalence. It appears in one or other of three basic forms or else in some combination of them. According to the view adopted in this paper, bio-informational equivalence, in all its forms, has a deeply anthropocentric core which makes it unsuited for its present role as a quasi-theoretical perspective in biological science.

Animals↗
PubMed1985

Physical models of biological information and adaptation.

The bio-informational equivalence asserts that biological processes reduce to processes of information transfer. In this paper, that equivalence is treated as a metaphor with deeply anthropomorphic content of a sort that resists constitutive-analytical definition, including formulation within mathematical theories of information. It is argued that continuance of the metaphor, as a quasi-theoretical perspective in biology, must entail a methodological dislocation between biological and physical science. It is proposed that a general class of functions, drawn from classical physics, can serve to eliminate the anthropomorphism. Further considerations indicate that the concept of biological adaptation is central to the general applicability of the informational idea in biology; a non-anthropomorphic treatment of adaptive phenomena is suggested in terms of variational principles.

Adaptation, Biological↗