Codes and Evolution The Origin of Absolute Novelties

About this book

This text builds upon the over 1500 papers published in peer-reviewed journals revealing that there are more than 200 biological codes in living systems. This book shows how this discovery argues that coding is a new mechanism of life. The existence of many biological codes, furthermore, Barbieri posits, is one of those experimental facts that has extraordinary theoretical consequences. It implies that coding is not only a mechanism that constantly operates in all living systems, but also a mechanism of evolution. More precisely, a mechanism that gave rise to the absolute novelties of the history of life. This amounts to saying that evolution took place by two distinct mechanisms, by natural selection and by natural conventions. These two mechanisms are fundamentally different; natural selection is the result of copying and deals with information, whereas natural conventions are the result of coding and deal with meaning. This volume appeals to students and researchers working in the fields of semiotics, philosophy, biology and mathematics.

Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction

Part 1: The History of Code Biology
Chapter 2. Ribosome microcrystals
Chapter 3. Semantic Biology
Chapter 4. The New World of Codes
Chapter 5. From Biosemiotics to Code Biology

Part 2: The Great Events of Macroevolution
Chapter 6. The Divide between Life and Matter
Chapter 7. Evolution of the Genetic Code
Chapter 8. Prokaryotes and Eukaryotes
Chapter 9. The Cambrian Explosion
Chapter 10. The Origin of Mind
Chapter 11. The Origin of Language

Chapter 12. Conclusion
References

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Biography

Marcello Barbieri is retired professor of Embryology at the University of Ferrara, Italy. He has conducted research on embryonic development and ribosome crystallization at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge UK, the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda USA, and the Max-Planck-Institut fur Molekulare Genetik in Berlin. He has been the founder and first editor-in-chief of the Springer journal Biosemiotics, a position from which he resigned in order to found the new research field of Code Biology.