Chapter 1 Human and Animal Communication 11.1 Language, that amazing thing 11.2 The mechanics of language 21.3 What is syntax? 101.4 Meaning 111.5 Beyond meaning 131.6 Non-human languages 141.7 Types of language 171.8 Why give information? 231.9 The autonomy of information 281.10 Language and information 31Chapter 2 Genetic Information 332.1 A central concept in biology 332.2 Epigenetic information 402.3 The environment 422.4 Information: from replication to reproduction 482.5 Mutation and selection 492.6 The story of the message: phylogeny and coalescence 522.7 The point of view of the reading system 582.8 We cannot see the wood for the trees 602.9 The tree and the web and some complexities there! 642.10 When information and individual can no longer be confused 662.11 Conflicts and levels of integration: avatars 712.12 Sociobiology, altruism and information 732.13 The "all genetics" versus epigenetics 752.14 What is Life? 77Chapter 3 Ecosystem and Information 793.1 An information-centered perspective of the ecosystem 793.2 Reservoirs of ecosystemic information 823.3 Biodiversity: an ecosystem made up of individuals 873.4 Phylogeny of communities: biology in the arena 903.5 The ecosystem: a physical system or a biological system? 923.6 An ecosystem made up of matter and energy 963.7 Failure of the physical approach 983.8 Physics has not said its last word 1063.9 The great challenges of ecology 1103.10 Flow and balance of ecosystemic information 1173.11 Ecosystemic codes 1213.12 The languages of the ecosystem 129Chapter 4 Can We Define Information? 1334.1 Information as surprise 1334.2 Information measured by complexity 1364.3 Information as organized complexity 1374.4 Information as compression 1394.5 Coding and information reading 1424.6 Memory 145Chapter 5 Evolution of Information 1495.1 In the beginning was structure 1495.2 The first languages were ecosystemic 1515.3 The replicators and the conservators 1525.4 Biological languages 1555.5 Information selection 1565.6 Messages and languages 1585.7 The complexification of codes. 1595.8 Complexification of languages 1615.9 The re-creation of life 1645.10 And what about tomorrow? 166References 169Index 179

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.