دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی سیستم های اطلاعات بیولوژیکی: تکامل به عنوان مدیریت اطلاعات مبتنی بر شناختی - الزویر 2018

abstract

An alternative biological synthesis is presented that conceptualizes evolutionary biology as an epiphenomenon of integrated self-referential information management. Since all biological information has inherent ambiguity, the systematic assessment of information is required by living organisms to maintain self-identity and homeostatic equipoise in confrontation with environmental challenges. Through their self-referential attachment to information space, cells are the cornerstone of biological action. That individualized assessment of information space permits self-referential, self-organizing niche construction. That deployment of information and its subsequent selection enacted the dominant stable unicellular informational architectures whose biological expressions are the prokaryotic, archaeal, and eukaryotic unicellular forms. Multicellularity represents the collective appraisal of equivocal environmental information through a shared information space. This concerted action can be viewed as systematized information management to improve information quality for the maintenance of preferred homeostatic boundaries among the varied participants. When reiterated in successive scales, this same collaborative exchange of information yields macroscopic organisms as obligatory multicellular holobionts. Cognition-Based Evolution (CBE) upholds that assessment of information precedes biological action, and the deployment of information through integrative self-referential niche construction and natural cellular engineering antecedes selection. Therefore, evolutionary biology can be framed as a complex reciprocating interactome that consists of the assessment, communication, deployment and management of information by self-referential organisms at multiple scales in continuous confrontation with environmental stresses.

Conclusion

Contemporary evolutionary theory has liberty to move beyond genes and their selection to accommodate a counter focus based upon self-referential cognition as the universal living condition. Living things are set apart from the inanimate by their selfreferential attachment to informational space-time. This obligatory union is a connection to physical space as current status and to time as an historical memory of an immediately prior status. The fundamental difference between an abiotic predecessor and its ensuing biotic ensemble can be specifically identified as residing in the use of information as a self-referential awareness of its limitations. It is the predicament of living things that any attempted resolution of environmental stresses must advance through the deployment of ambiguous information. This attachment to uncertain information defines the living condition. In attempting to maintain self-referential homeostatic equipoise, cells simply make the best of it within the disciplining confines of selection. Within that self-referential context, genes and all other cellular components are implements to be actively deployed. Still, chance plays its part. Everything new and unexpected establishes a fresh space of possibilities that might be realized (Coffman, 2014).