Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
shaking up (noise)
F
IGURE
12. Von Foerster's magnets.
Shaking up the magnets increases the
complexity of the structure, which is equivalent to a self-organisation process.
redundant, noise will increase the quantity of information in the
system rather than decrease it. This increase will induce it to self-
organise due to the increase in complexity. The principle of this the-
ory is simple to understand. If a system is composed of several
identical entities, noise randomly modifies each entity and thus cre-
ates a variety of structures richer than the initial homogeneous set.
If each element corresponds to a piece of information, e.g. to a gene,
the total quantity of information likewise increases.
“
In the transmission of information between DNA nucleotide
sequences and protein amino-acid sequences for example, it is
known that there are always errors equivalent to what is called
noise in a communication channel. It is easy to conceive of these
errors producing a negative effect which, in the formalisation of
quantities of information, developed by Shannon, results in a quan-
tity of the information transmitted being deducted. The effect of
