Information Theory and the Living System

Gatlin · Complexity & Systems, Origins · Columbia University Press · 1972 · Paywalled

The source of the constraint vocabulary this corpus runs on, and a book almost nobody reading Juarrero or Cynefin has opened. Gatlin applies Shannon information theory to DNA, and in doing so draws the distinction that everything downstream depends on. Context-free constraints take a system away from equiprobability: they bias the dice, making some outcomes likelier than others regardless of what else is happening. Context-sensitive constraints take it away from independence: they make what happens next depend on what happened just before, correlating the dice rather than merely loading them. The second kind is the interesting one, and Gatlin is where the argument is made that constraints of that sort do not only close options down. By making parts depend on each other they let a system do things no part could do alone, which is why constrained systems become capable rather than merely restricted, and it is the formal ancestor of every enabling constraint in the organisational literature. Juarrero takes the distinction from here explicitly, and Cynefin takes it from Juarrero, so a vocabulary now used to talk about teams and governance reaches back through philosophy to information theory applied to genomes. The loop closes neatly on this map: Gatlin quotes Weaver, of Shannon and Weaver, and Weaver opens the complexity trail. The honest reading is that the biology has aged and the distinction has not. Gatlin's specific evolutionary claims, that vertebrates increased context-sensitivity while holding message variety roughly constant, belong to a moment when information theory looked like it might explain genomes, and molecular evolution went elsewhere. The book is also demanding, out of print, and reductionist in a way its philosophical readers are not. It earns its place here as the origin of a working idea rather than as living biology, which is a fair description of several foundations on this map.

Gatlin, L.L. (1972) Information Theory and the Living System. New York: Columbia University Press.

Neighbours (8)

• An Introduction to Cybernetics (paper)
• Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (paper)
• Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (paper)
• Science and Complexity (paper)
• The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-Making in a Complex and Complicated World (paper)
• Complexity
• Rewetting Organisations
• Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence (paper)