Search results for ""Author Thierry Gaudin""

Chance, Calculation and Life brings together 16 original papers from the colloquium of the same name, organized by the International Cultural Center of Cerisy in 2019. From mathematics to the humanities and biology, there are many concepts and questions related to chance. What are the different types of chance? Does chance correspond to a lack of knowledge about the causes of events, or is there a truly intrinsic and irreducible chance? Does chance preside over our decisions? Does it govern evolution? Is it at the origin of life? What part do chance and necessity play in biology? This book answers these fundamental questions by bringing together the clear and richly documented contributions of mathematicians, physicists, biologists and philosophers who make this book an incomparable tool for work and reflection.

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Developed from presentations given at the Cerisy SVSI (Sciences de la vie, sciences de l’information) conference held in 2016, this book presents a broad overview of thought and research at the intersection of life sciences and information sciences. The contributors to this edited volume explore life and information on an equal footing, with each considered as crucial to the other. In the first part of the book, the relation of life and information in the functioning of genes, at both the phylogenetic and ontogenetic levels, is articulated and the common understanding of DNA as code is problematized from a range of perspectives. The second part of the book homes in on the algorithmic nature of information, questioning the fit between life and automaton and the accompanying division between individualization and invariance. Consisting of both philosophical speculation and ethological research, the explorations in this book are a timely intervention into prevailing understandings of the relation between information and life.

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