Böcker av Cedric Gaucherel

The central hypothesis of this book could be described as follows: "Drawing on natural (human) languages, we could benefit in terms of understanding and possibly management, by searching for languages everywhere in life sciences, and I suggest that these languages are interlinked in time by specific mechanisms." To explore this hypothesis, the book structure is based on five chapters: the evolution of writing systems; the information concept in life sciences; the ubiquity of grammar and language; the chronology of languages and origins of life; and Philosophical justifications.This book is a personal mixture of well established results and speculative intuitions. The reader will often be asked to accept in an unconventional situation, adopting a linguistic and informational point of view, rather than a more traditional biological and mathematical point of view. The reader should not be afraid by it and will be rewarded to gain a bird's-eye view of the coherence of the whole.

This book explores the unity of life. It proposes that the concept of information is the inner essence of what we today call life. The importance of information for our species is obvious. Human beings are highly dependent on information, constantly exchanging with conspecifics. In a less apparent way, we are the product of genetic and epigenetic information which determines our development in a given environment from a fertilized egg to the adult stage. Even less apparent is that information plays a determining role in ecosystems. This observation may include the prebiotic systems in which life emerged. Our claim is that Nature processes information continuously. This means that even beyond living entities, we can see messages and decoding procedures. Nature can be said to send messages to its own future and then to decode them. Nature "talks" to itself! The systematic organization of messages suggests that, in some respects, we should even speak of the "languages" of Nature.