Principles and origins of coding systems. Does information acquire meaning naturally

Natural selection among replicative entities allows for the accumulation of information during biological evolution, but it does not account for the orderly development of selected biochemical processes which now constitute a restricted mapping from genotype to phenotype. The self-organisation of biochemical processes is described in terms of a set of simple rate equations, which are solved for the special case of systems for which functions are mapped onto structures in a random fashion. When catalytic action is dependent on symbol recognition, so that biochemical synthesis is instructed by information, coding self-organisation can take place, but loss of information beyond a certain threshold results in catastrophic loss of function. It is argued that a partnership between Darwinian selection and functional self-organisation is fundamental to biological evolution.