Codes and Evolution: The Origin of Absolute Novelties

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. The author claims this experimental fact is bound to change biology forever. This book shows how this very discovery reveals that coding is a new mechanism of life, just as the discovery of electromagnetism revealed the existence of a new physical force in the universe. The existence of many biological codes, furthermore, Barbieri argues, is one of those experimental facts that have 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 origin 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, two mechanisms that are fundamentally different because 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.

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 für 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.