Table of Contents

1. Cover
2. Preface
3. Introduction
   1. I.1. We can change the medium without changing the information
   2. I.2. Where does information exist?
   3. I.3. What is information?
4. Acknowledgments
5. 1 Human and Animal Communication
   1. 1.1. Language, that amazing thing
   2. 1.2. The mechanics of language
   3. 1.3. What is syntax?
   4. 1.4. Meaning
   5. 1.5. Beyond meaning
   6. 1.6. Non-human languages
   7. 1.7. Types of language
   8. 1.8. Why give information?
   9. 1.9. The autonomy of information
   10. 1.10. Language and information
6. 2 Genetic Information
   1. 2.1. A central concept in biology
   2. 2.2. Epigenetic information
   3. 2.3. The environment
   4. 2.4. Information: from replication to reproduction
   5. 2.5. Mutation and selection
   6. 2.6. The story of the message: phylogeny and coalescence
   7. 2.7. The point of view of the reading system
   8. 2.8. We cannot see the wood for the trees
   9. 2.9. The tree and the web … and some complexities there!
   10. 2.10. When information and individual can no longer be confused
   11. 2.11. Conflicts and levels of integration: avatars
   12. 2.12. Sociobiology, altruism and information
   13. 2.13. The “all genetics” versus epigenetics
   14. 2.14. What is Life?
7. 3 Ecosystem and Information
   1. 3.1. An information-centered perspective of the ecosystem
   2. 3.2. Reservoirs of ecosystemic information
   3. 3.3. Biodiversity: an ecosystem made up of individuals
   4. 3.4. Phylogeny of communities: biology in the arena
   5. 3.5. The ecosystem: a physical system or a biological system?
   6. 3.6. An ecosystem made up of matter and energy
   7. 3.7. Failure of the physical approach
   8. 3.8. Physics has not said its last word
   9. 3.9. The great challenges of ecology
   10. 3.10. Flow and balance of ecosystemic information
   11. 3.11. Ecosystemic codes
   12. 3.12. The languages of the ecosystem
8. 4 Can We Define Information?
   1. 4.1. Information as surprise
   2. 4.2. Information measured by complexity
   3. 4.3. Information as organized complexity
   4. 4.4. Information as compression
   5. 4.5. Coding and information reading
   6. 4.6. Memory
9. 5 Evolution of Information
   1. 5.1. In the beginning was structure
   2. 5.2. The first languages were ecosystemic
   3. 5.3. The replicators and the conservators
   4. 5.4. Biological languages
   5. 5.5. Information selection
   6. 5.6. Messages and languages
   7. 5.7. The complexification of codes
   8. 5.8. Complexification of languages
   9. 5.9. The re-creation of life
   10. 5.10. And what about tomorrow?
10. References
11. Index
12. End User License Agreement

List of Tables

1. Chapter 1
   1. Table 1.1. Classification of types of language
   2. Table 1.2. Analog and digital compared
2. Chapter 2
   1. Table 2.1. When possible, some correspondences may be identified between the dis...
   2. Table 2.2. Correspondence between the various information types (right) found in...

List of Illustrations

1. Chapter 1
   1. Figure 1.1. A code enables a transition from the domain of signs to the domain o...
   2. Figure 1.2. The principal signs and their associated meanings in the code of und...
   3. Figure 1.3. Combinatorial coding
   4. Figure 1.4. Examples of partially combinatorial code: traffic signs © Crown copy...
   5. Figure 1.5. Illustration of the parallel between the combinatorial hierarchies o...
   6. Figure 1.6. Combinatorial decoding. The curved arrow shows how meanings at a lev...
   7. Figure 1.7. Combinatorial encoding. The curved arrows indicate transitions in th...
   8. Figure 1.8. Illustration of the trajectory of a bee in her hive, which she uses ...
   9. Figure 1.9. Pictorial representation of types of signifier–signified relations. ...
   10. Figure 1.10. Derivational relationships between codes
   11. Figure 1.11. An Arabian babbler (Turdoides squamiceps). For a color version of t...
2. Chapter 2
   1. Figure 2.1. The translation of a DNA molecule into a mRNA molecule (courtesy of ...
   2. Figure 2.2. The mRNA molecule and the tRNA molecules are gradually building prot...
   3. Figure 2.3. Classification of amino acids according to their constitutive nucleo...
   4. Figure 2.4. Trait distributions from the parents (up) to offsprings (bottom). In...
   5. Figure 2.5. Genealogy of the genetic information highlighting coalescent events
   6. Figure 2.6. Genealogy of the genetic information with recent coalescence events ...
   7. Figure 2.7. Phylogeny of some animal groups (left) with their distances (right) ...
   8. Figure 2.8. The famous phylogenic tree drawn in Darwin’s book on origin of speci...
   9. Figure 2.9. The famous phylogenic tree drawn in Haeckel’s book
   10. Figure 2.10. The lineage of the three main living realms known so far
   11. Figure 2.11. As the three main realms of life are not rooted so far (left), seve...
   12. Figure 2.12. A more realistic tree of life (as a network) taking into account la...
   13. Figure 2.13. Flowers of thyme (up) and a bee pollinating and feeding on thyme fl...
   14. Figure 2.14. A Mendelian inheritance (up) of plants, and a corrected conception ...
3. Chapter 3
   1. Figure 3.1. A car without its shell, and without its driver. Let’s imagine the c...
   2. Figure 3.2. Illustration of the use of the Shannon index to quantify the structu...
   3. Figure 3.3. A trophic network (a) is a graph connecting nodes and species, speci...
4. Chapter 5
   1. Figure 5.1. A representation of the complexification of languages

Guide

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