Languages of unfolding hereditary information in еmbryogenesis: linguo-semiotic analogues and analogies

Abstract

It is known that almost all hereditary information about the innumerable characteristics of a multicellular organism, including the human body, is encoded in a certain way in the nucleus of a fertilized egg. The principles of the unfolding of genetic information in the development of a multicellular embryo have long attracted the attention of both biologists and representatives of various sciences. While molecular biologists concentrate on the infor­ma­tional and cybernetic aspects of the storage and transmission of genetic information, the au­thors of biosemiotic studies insist on the specificity of biological signs in these processes and on the special nature of biological texts. We focused on the information aspects of these pro­cesses and, in order to demonstrate the analogies between them and with linguistic-semiotic concepts, we describe the problems of complexity and hierarchy of genetic mechanisms for the implementation of genetic information in embryogenesis, as it is seen in systems biology.

Keywords

• biosemiotics
• linguistics
• hereditary information
• information unfolding in individual development
• languages of gene regulation