>Thanks Wirt - incredibly informative response.  I might have learned more
>from this ~14kb post than I did wallowing through all 1500 pages of
>Wolfram's latest exposition (though user error is probably to cite!).
>Was/has this been published somewhere?

I would have sent this reply to you privately, but your email bounces.

No, the material hasn't been published elsewhere. The text is a solely a
sci.bio.evolution contribution, however that doesn't mean that I won't use it
sometime in the future. Otherwise, I very much appreciate the comments.

If you're interested in this kind of material, let me recommend something else
that you might truly enjoy. Maynard V. Olson is the Director of the Human
Genome project at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is also an adjunct
faculty member of the Computer Engineering Department on campus. Last year, he
gave the 26th Annual Faculty Lecture at the University of Washington. 

Of perhaps greatest interest, he said something during his talk that struck a
deep resonance with me. Olson said that one of the most important papers in
biology is a paper that very few biologists have ever heard of, and even fewer
have read: a 1948 paper by Claude Shannon in the Bell System Technical Journal,
entitled, "A mathematical theory of communication."

Although I watched Olson's lecture via UWTV's satellite feed, it is available
on the web at:

     http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=1258

If you wish to get to the meat of the talk faster, begin the playback at about
11 minutes 30 seconds.

Over the years, I've written virtually the same thing here on sci.bio.evolution
as Olson spoke of, and I have condensed a number of those prior postings into a
short published document: a note on the death of Claude Shannon two years that
appeared in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. It is available
at:

    http://aics-research.com/research/esa-shannon.pdf

Perhaps 50% of that note was cut and pasted from prior sci.bio.evolution posts,
thus there is a good chance that the material on pleiotropy will be used in the
future too.

But the more important point in both Olson's and my contributions (and Dawkins,
who I extensively quote in the note) is that there is a physics to information,
and that that physics is no differently implemented in natural systems than in
the ones we engineer.

I wrote in the Shannon note:

"There may be a no more broadly
repeated pattern than that of information,
nor a more intriguing general
philosophy than that there is a physics
to information, and that we are
beginning to understand it, simply
because we first deduced how to manipulate
it ourselves in the machines
we build. Because of that, we find
that we’ve come to understand the
nature, mechanisms, and processes
of life all the more deeply".

Wirt Atmar
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