Preprint Challenges Genetic Determinism: Information Theory Shows Genomes Can't Fully Specify Organisms
ctjlewis · x · 2026-08-01
A new preprint, Information-theoretic Limits on Programmatic Specification of Biological Systems, challenges the prevailing paradigm in molecular biology that has dominated for over 70 years.
Using information theory, the authors demonstrate that an organism does not contain enough organism-specific information to specify its own fully functioning microscopic organization. For decades, biology has treated the genome as an executable script or structural blueprint, yet it remained a mystery how it orchestrates the fine-scale molecular machinery across space and time.
The paper proposes a radically different formulation: the genome is not a figure-skating program choreographing every molecular movement, but rather a hockey coach setting the rules and strategies, leaving the microscopic execution to physical and chemical self-organization.
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