CHAPTER 4 Information and communication in living systems

Living systems are able to communicate, i.e., they can exchange information. Communication processes are based upon an organization which is common to both man-made and biological systems. A first purpose of this chapter is to derive a number of concepts, such as that of entropy or self-information, defined as the monovariate moment of a distribution of the log of a probability of occurrence of an event. In this chapter, are also discussed the concepts of joint and conditional entropies, as well as that of mutual information, with the aim of showing that the very concept of information is based on the ability of a system (for instance a communication channel) to associate signs in a specific manner so as to allow communication of a message. The relations between communication and mapping, the subadditivity principle, and the laws of coding are also discussed. The subadditivity principle is of particular interest. It states that the joint entropy of the channel is at most equal (and in general smaller) to the sum of the entropies of the source and the destination. This principle prevents the channel from generating its own information. The last part of this chapter is devoted to the analysis of information transfer between DNA and proteins viewed as a communication channel.

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