The biological information flow: From cell theory to a new evolutionary synthesis

Abstract

Traditionally ignored in comparison with the energy flow, the interest on the information flow and in general on the informational perspective is nowadays manifest in biological fields. Herein we will revisit classical ideas on biomolecular information processing, basically from Efim Liberman and Michael Conrad, weaving them together with new views on the information flow as captured by cellular signaling systems and with the development of biological complexity. A consistent new explanatory framework looms—potentially contributing to a new cell theory. It would incorporate fundamental conceptualizations on the mechanisms of molecular recognition and informational architectures, the life cycle and the characterization of meaning, and finally the emergence of biological complexity. Concerning the evolutionary process, this informational approach depicts an indefinite series of recursion processes performed in the open-ended environment of the real world, potentially affected by multiple contingencies modifying the informational architectures involved in recursion. Consequently, a large variety of molecular tools and systems would have been incorporated speeding up the variability of genomes and facilitating their displacement in sequence space. To the extent to which the comparison with human mobility in physical space may hold, a power law could be hypothesized interconnecting the variability outcomes of the different evolutionary ‘vehicles’ or variation modes. Contributing to a renewed discussion on the evolutionary process is another essential goal of the present work.