The metaphorical adoption of the concepts of information, program and signal introduced into biology the logic and implicit causal structure of the mathematical theories of information; this is inimical to biology. In turn, those metaphors have hindered the development of a theory of organisms by transferring the agency of organisms to natural selection and to DNA. Moreover, those metaphors introduced into biology the dualism software-hardware and a Laplacian causal structure. Instead, we propose to uphold the agency of the living by adopting three foundational principles for a theory of organisms: namely, 1) the principle of biological inertia (i.e., the default state of cells is proliferation and motility), 2) the principle of variation, and 3) the principle of organization.
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| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7577589 | PMC |
| http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2020.1794389 | DOI Listing |
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