Information as a Manifestation of Development

Information manifests a reduction in uncertainty or indeterminacy. As such itcan emerge in two ways: by measurement, which involves the intentional choices of anobserver; or more generally, by development, which involves systemically mutual (‘self-organizing’) processes that break symmetry. The developmental emergence ofinformation is most obvious in ontogeny, but pertains as well to the evolution ofecosystems and abiotic dissipative structures. In this review, a seminal, well-characterizedontogenetic paradigm—the sea urchin embryo—is used to show how cybernetic causalityengenders the developmental emergence of biological information at multiple hierarchicallevels of organization. The relevance of information theory to developmental genomics isalso discussed