Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology
Volume 182, September 2023, Pages 34-48
A revised central dogma for the 21st century: all biology is cognitive information processing
William B. Miller Jr. a, František Baluška b, Arthur S. Reber c
a Paradise Valley, AZ, USA
b IZMB, University of Bonn, Kirschellee 1, 53115, Bonn, Germany
c Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Received 10 February 2023, Revised 28 March 2023, Accepted 30 May 2023, Available online 1 June 2023, Version of Record 6 June 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2023.05.005
Abstract
Crick's Central Dogma has been a foundational aspect of 20th century biology, describing an implicit relationship governing the flow of information in biological systems in biomolecular terms. Accumulating scientific discoveries support the need for a revised Central Dogma to buttress evolutionary biology's still-fledgling migration from a Neodarwinian canon. A reformulated Central Dogma to meet contemporary biology is proposed: all biology is cognitive information processing. Central to this contention is the recognition that life is the self-referential state, instantiated within the cellular form. Self-referential cells act to sustain themselves and to do so, cells must be in consistent harmony with their environment. That consonance is achieved by the continuous assimilation of environmental cues and stresses as information to self-referential observers. All received cellular information must be analyzed to be deployed as cellular problem-solving to maintain homeorhetic equipoise. However, the effective implementation of information is definitively a function of orderly information management. Consequently, effective cellular problem-solving is information processing and management. The epicenter of that cellular information processing is its self-referential internal measurement. All further biological self-organization initiates from this obligate activity. As the internal measurement by cells of information is self-referential by definition, self-reference is biological self-organization, underpinning 21st century Cognition-Based Biology.
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