[Alamo-Girl]

What would y'all think about fabricating some words of our own to meet our purposes for this discussion? For instance,

Biocomm – Shannon information, successful communication, reduction of uncertainty as applied to molecular biology

Biocast – Channel capacity and noise [Shannon] available to a biological system to facilitate a gain of information content, i.e. the broadcast or incoming message.

Biolearn – Gain of information content in a molecular machine, Shannon bits, decrease in information entropy, increase in thermodynamic entropy in local surroundings.

Bioknow – Accrued information content in a biological organism, e.g. DNA

Biolanguage – The encoding/decoding in Biocomm, i.e. semiosis.

Biothought – The property of complexity (Kolmogorov, self-organizing, physical, irreducible, functional, specified – or whatever we decide) which exists in the Biocomm.

Biostructure – The biological system in which Biocomm exists, i.e. autonomy

[PatrickHenry]

I can go with "decrease in entropy." That is what's observed. It's certainly better than some of the other terms that have been tossed around in the past: information, communication, message, code, meaning, broadcast, etc. Whatever does not suggest, either to the writer having a momentary lapse, or to the overly suggestive reader, that someone, or something is inherently involved in the process is fine with me. Mind now, I'm not playing the materialism game by ruling anything out. I just don't want to load up the vocabulary one way or the other.