[Fis] Essential Core?

Thu Jul 7 18:52:49 CEST 2016

Dear Pedro and colleagues, 

Just as “information” should not be made more complex than the expected information content of a message (which can be expressed, for example, in bits of information, so should, in my opinion, “communication” not be undertheorized. I never heard two cells or chimpanzees apologize for a misunderstanding. Communication and the development of discursive knowledge are more complex processes than to “consider that communication and self-production are but the two inseparable sides of the bio "coin" --in order to self-produce the living has to communicate with the environment, and in order to communicate the living needs its flexible self-production processes... (just to fabricate the meaning!)” 

This is biological communication. It is pre-linguistic. The claim that the biological is universal or that universals of communication can be “found” – where? – is disrespectful to the humanities. If found, these so-called “universals” are constructed in a biological discourse which does poorly understand itself as a form of communication. Biology as a science itself is communication. What happens between cells can only be specified / hypothesized in communication. Using the word “communication” for the external referent of the communication is metaphorical.

In other words, the priority is not to be found in the biology, but constructed in the communication.

Best,

Loet

  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

 <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> loet at leydesdorff.net ;  <http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Associate Faculty,  <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of Sussex; 

Guest Professor  <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/> Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; Visiting Professor,  <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> ISTIC, Beijing;

Visiting Professor,  <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> Birkbeck, University of London; 

 <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en> http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en

From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Pedro C. Marijuan
Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2016 1:54 PM
To: 'fis'
Subject: [Fis] Essential Core?

Dear FISers,

[NOTE: I have just seen the new post from Marcus right now: I should modify parts of the discussion below, but it is too much work! Better left for a future exchange...]

About the a priori modeling of information --and meaning-- which was the focus of Marcus' presentation, putting together Shannon, Bateson, and Darwin, I am not sure how that scheme would translate into the "real" living stuff. Mostly thinking on the work my team has done on bacterial communication for years, I mentioned days ago three basic points about that: universals, species-specificity, and essential cores. 

How a plurality of those information universals could be wrapped or articulated around an essential core? That's the toughest point in my opinion. It becomes a matter for freewheeling speculation, badly needed of Schrodinger's disclaimer. Well, let us consider that communication and self-production are but the two inseparable sides of the bio "coin" --in order to self-produce the living has to communicate with the environment, and in order to communicate the living needs its flexible self-production processes... (just to fabricate the meaning!)

In bacteria, the side of communication might be seen as implying:

--Communication for self-production: detection and introjection/ejection of environmental substances (water, anions, cations, minerals, nutrients, metabolites, waste, and toxics). In bacteria this is crucial. Most of it, apart from the spontaneous membrane permeability, is done by around one hundred different ONE-COMPONENT SYSTEMS (1CS) and a variety of channels and transporters. 

--Communication with con-specifics: in reproduction (sex exchanges, plasmid exchanges); in social structures (colonies and biofilms); in "differentiation" (sporulation, occasional differentiated types). Around 10-20 TWO-COMPONENT SYSTEMS (2CS) may be in charge, although amply swapping their functions with the previous 1CSs.

--Ecosystem communication: cooperation and competition with other species in ecosystems; chemical arm races with fungi, viruses, other bacteria, protists, etc.; symbiosis, cooperation and parasitism with multicellular hosts; pathogenic switching... We may find tools such as 1CS, 2CS, 3CS, special protein kinases, and very complex apparatuses for pathogenesis, predation, and chemical arm races.

Not much emphasis needed in that those three items are universals, species specific, and more or less differentiated/entangled within the mentioned communication side of the bio core. 

Thereafter, thinking about the universals side of self-production, could we terribly simplify our informational view of self-production, as Francis Crick's mandated with his Central Dogma of molecular biology? Nonetheless it was the first cogent explanation of the flow of genetic information within a biological system. In any case, what we find is different informational architectures --membranes and cytoskeleton rudiments, nucleic acids, processing enzymes-- which are respectively based on identity, complementarity, and supplementarity principles (Shu-Kun Lin). They are playing together the replication, transcription, translation, house-keeping, and degradation functions that apparently integrate the bulk of self-production... 

Summing up the obtained items, and just to close the present speculation, we might have found three universals of communication and another five of self-production. Indeed they look very densely entangled within an essential core. At stake is whether they are sufficiently congruent and ontologically robust. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is that herein it becomes relatively easy to upend meaning, value, knowledge-recombination and other members of the conceptual cluster that usually accompanies information.

Thanking in advance for the patience!

--Pedro

-- 
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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