Semantics and Neural Development

The latter-day success of molecular biology in providing a physical account of the structure and function of the hereditary material was in large part due to the focus of its founders on the concept of “genetic information”. As was spelled out thirty-five years ago by Erwin Schro’dinger (1945) in his seminal book What Is Life?, the gene can be viewed as an information carrier whose physical structure corresponds to an aperiodic succession of a small number of isomeric elements of a hereditary codescript. Eventually, the gene was identified as a segment of a double helical DNA molecule residing in the chromosomes of the cell nucleus. The isomeric elements of the hereditary codescript turned out to be the four nucleotide bases adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine, which embody the genetic information by their aperiodic linear seguence along the DNA molecule. And as far as the meaning of the information contained in an individual gene is concerned, it was first put forward as an a priori dogmatic postulate and later established as an empirical fact, that the linear seguence of DNA nucleotide bases stands for the linear seguence of amino acids of a particular protein molecule.

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