Information and Life - Battail, Gérard.; SpringerLink (Online service) (Dordrecht : Springer Netherlands : Imprint: Springer, 2014)
1. Introduction -- 2. What is information? 2.1 Information in a usual meaning. 2.2 Features of information as a scientific entity. 2.3 Comments on the definitions of information. 2.4 An information as a nominable entity. 2.5 Short history of communication engineering. 2.6 Communication over space or over time -- 3. Basic principles of communication engineering. 3.1 Physical inscription of a single symbol. 3.2 Physical inscription of a sequence. 3.3 Receiving a binary symbol in the presence of noise. 3.4 Communicating sequences in the presence of noise -- 4. Information theory for literal communication. 4.1 Shannon's paradigm and its variants. 4.2 Quantitative measures of information. 4.3 Source coding -- 5. Channel capacity and channel coding. 5.1 Channel models. 5.2 Capacity of a channel. 5.3 Channel coding needs redundancy. 5.4 On the fundamental theorem of channel coding. 5.5 Error-correcting codes -- 6. Information as a fundamental entity. 6.1 Algorithmic information theory. 6.2 Emergent information in populations. 6.3 Physical entropy and information. 6.4 Information bridges the abstract and the concrete -- 7. An introduction to the second part. 7.1 Relationship with biosemiotics. 7.2 Content and spirit of the second part -- 8. Heredity as a communication problem. 8.1 The enduring genome. 8.2 Consequences meet biological reality. 8.3 A toy living world. 8.4 Identifying genomic error-correcting codes -- 9. Information is specific to life. 9.1 Information and life are indissolubly linked. 9.2 Semantic feedback loops. 9.3 Information as a fundamental entity. 9.4 Nature as an engineer -- 10. Life within the physical world. 10.1 A poorly understood divide. 10.2 Maxwell's demon in physics and in life -- 10.3 A measurement as a means for acquiring information -- 11. Conclusion.
Keywords: Life sciences; Biology-Philosophy.; Information theory; Biomathematics; Life Sciences, general; Philosophy of Biology; Information and Communication, Circuits; Mathematical and Computational Biology