Tim Birkhead

sequence, and so co-polymers were made in which the proportions of the two nucleotides were varied and the percentages of the amino acids incorporated determined. These were then compared with the statistical composition of the RNAs. A breakthrough came when Nirenberg and Phil Leder developed the fi lter-binding assay that enabled assignments to be made to a single triplet. And so it was that Crick could proclaim that the 1966 Symposium was an historic occasion. In just 13 years, what had seemed a daunting task had been accomplished. Returning to Cobb's theme, what was the contribution of information theory to the task? The short answer is, I think, 'none' and Cobb's discussion of this is one of the most interesting parts of his book. Things began to fall apart in the mid to late 1950s and the discussions at a 1956 meeting at Oak Ridge National Laboratory indicated the way the wind was blowing. Hubert Yockey, a physicist, organized the meeting and proclaimed that information theory would come to be as crucial to biology as thermodynamics was to physics and chemistry. But Henry Quastler, who only a few years before had been the cheerleader of applying information theory to biology, concluded that " Information theory…has not led to the discovery of new facts, nor has its applications to known facts been tested in critical experiments. To date, a defi nitive and valid judgment of the value of information theory to biology is not possible. " Warren McCullough put his fi nger on the problem when, in turning down an invitation to the meeting, wrote " I doubt whether information is yet properly attuned to the complexities of biological problems. " Indeed, as Cobb puts it, " Biological codes would not give up their secrets merely by being shown Shannon and Wiener's fi endish equations. " And what of theoretical approaches to biology in general? There have been attempts over the years to develop what its proponents called a theoretical biology, but by and large these attempts have failed to engage the attention of most biologists. In the 1920s, LeComte du Nouy applied mathematics to wound healing; in the 1930s, von Bertalanffy developed general systems theory and applied it to development while Joseph Woodger attempted to axiomatize biology. In the 1960s, a group led by Conrad Waddington and including biologists several meetings at the Villa Serbelloni, Lake Como. Their deliberations, reported …