John Avery: Information Theory and Evolution (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · bioinformatics, biology, biosemiotics, entropy, evolution, information technology, information theory
This highly interdisciplinary book discusses the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution (and also human cultural evolution), against the background of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Among the central themes is the seeming contradiction between the second law of thermodynamics and the high degree of order and complexity produced by living systems. This paradox has its resolution in the information content of the Gibbs free energy that enters the biosphere from outside sources, as the author shows. The role of information in human cultural evolution is another focus of the book. One of the final chapters discusses the merging of information technology and biotechnology into a new discipline — bio-information technology.
Publisher World Scientific, 2003
ISBN 9812383999, 9789812383990
Length 217 pages
Adrian Mackenzie: Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · algorithm, bioinformatics, code, programming, sociology, software, software art, software studies
“Software has often been marginalized in accounts of digital cultures and network societies. Although software is everywhere, it is hard to say what it actually is. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality is one of the first books to treat software seriously as a full-blown cultural process, and as a subtly powerful material in contemporary communication. From deCSS to Java, from Linux to Extreme Programming, this book analyses software artworks, operating systems, commercial products, infrastructures and programming practices. It explores social forms, identities, materialities and power relations associated with software, and it asks how software provokes the re-thinking of production, consumption and distribution as entwined cultural processes. Cutting Code argues that analysis of code as a mosaic of algorithms, protocols, infrastructures, and programming conventions offers valuable insights into how contemporary social formations invent new kinds of personhood and new ways of acting.”
Publisher Peter Lang, 2006
ISBN 0820478237, 9780820478234
215 pages
Keywords and phrases
bioinformatics, Linux kernel, Java Virtual Machine, deCSS, extreme programming, JUnit, operating system, Sun Microsystems, CORBA, open-source software, software art, Java programming language, ontology, software development, unit tests, Linus Torvalds, RAMOSS, source code, Perl poetry, Unix philosophy
PDF (updated on 2019-12-16)
Comments (4)Eugene Thacker: Biomedia (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · autopoiesis, bioethics, bioinformatics, biotechnology, genetics, nanotechnology, posthuman, systems theory
As biotechnology defines the new millennium, genetic codes and computer codes increasingly merge-life understood as data, flesh rendered programmable. Where this trend will take us, and what it might mean, is what concerns Eugene Thacker in this timely book, a penetrating look into the intersection of molecular biology and computer science in our day and its likely ramifications for the future.
Integrating approaches from science and media studies, Biomedia is a critical analysis of research fields that explore relationships between biologies and technologies, between genetic and computer “codes.” In doing so, the book looks beyond the familiar examples of cloning, genetic engineering, and gene therapy-fields based on the centrality of DNA or genes-to emerging fields in which “life” is often understood as “information.” Focusing especially on interactions between genetic and computer codes, or between “life” and “information,” Thacker shows how each kind of “body” produced-from biochip to DNA computer-demonstrates how molecular biology and computer science are interwoven to provide unique means of understanding and controlling living matter.
Throughout, Thacker provides in-depth accounts of theoretical issues implicit in biotechnical artifacts-issues that arise in the fields of bioinformatics, proteomics, systems biology, and biocomputing. Research in biotechnology, Biomedia suggests, flouts our assumptions about the division between biological and technological systems. New ways of thinking about this division are needed if we are to understand the cultural, social, and philosophical dimensions of such research, and this book marks a significant advance in the coming intellectual revolution.
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2004
ISBN 0816643520, 9780816643523
226 pages
Key terms: bioinformatics, bioMEMS, nanomedicine, DNA computer, bioethics, systems biology, nanotechnology, base pair, molecular biology, biotechnology, biocomputing, DNA chip, systems theory, posthuman, autopoiesis, bio-ethics, proteomics, programmable matter, wet lab, Bertalanffy
PDF (updated on 2013-3-16)
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