Paper: Information Theory and Molecular Biology: The Linguistic Code of Life

The rigorous application of Claude Shannon's mathematical information theory to the study of biological macromolecules, formalized by biophysicist Hubert P. Yockey, demonstrates that the human and cellular genome constitutes a literal, not metaphorical, semantic and symbolic structure. Yockey demonstrates algebraically that there is no law of physics or chemistry that can explain the origin of a symbolic code, since the chemical letters of DNA (nucleotides) do not have intrinsic physicochemical affinity for the amino acids they represent in protein synthesis. The genetic code is a conventional system of semantic abstraction independent of the material substrate, demonstrating incontrovertibly that purely mechanistic and chemical causes are incompetent to generate specific meaningful information.