Dace:
> Okay. You can use the term in that sense if you want. According to the
> colloquial usage, information could exist concretely on a page or in
> soundwaves.
>
> It should be noted, however, that *even in this sense* DNA contains no
> information.
Sure it does. Each DNA strand pair consists of a succession of _bases_, of which there are four, which code for a number of proteins and probably also contain control markers ("stop here", "da capo", etc.) This is exactly the sort of thing Shannon studied -- this base and not that one, this and not that, leading up to this protein and not that at this time and not that. I've been told it is so language-like that it has double-entendres. Fascinating stuff. You could write letters.... In fact, there's a science-fiction story in which someone codes up some terribly important secret as a virus and infects an egg with it, so as to get it out of the country or something like that. Unfortunately, someone boils the egg for breakfast, breaking all the DNA chains.
Here's an example of the way people talk about genetics these days:
Title: Algorithms on Strings, Trees, and Sequences:
Computer Science and Computational Biology
Author:
Dan Gusfield
Year:
1997
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
ISBN:
0521585198
Notes:
String algorithms are a traditional area of study
in computer science. In recent years their importance has
grown dramatically with the huge increase of electronically
stored text and of molecular sequence data produced by various
genome projects. This book explains a wide range of computer
methods for string processing. It also contains extensive
discussions on biological problems that are cast as string
problems, and on techniques to solve them. The book is both
a reference for computer scientists and computer-oriented
professionals in biology and bio-informatics and a textbook
for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on string
algorithms and on computational biology.
(from http://www.hgmp.mrc.ac.uk/CCP11/books.txt.html )