ABSTRACT
The most popular account of genetic information in contemporary philosophy is “teleosemantics” (Millikan 1984; Maynard Smith 2000; Shea 2007; Kingsbury, Chapter 20 this volume). This yields a semantic notion of information—the information in a gene is a description or an instruction and as such genetic information can be true or false, obeyed or disobeyed. It also defines the information content of a gene in terms of the evolutionary history of that gene. Physically identical genes can have entirely different information content if they evolved due to different selective pressures. This way of thinking about genetic information corresponds closely to the image of genes in popular science. Genes are coded messages instructing organisms to develop in one way or another, and those instructions were written by evolution.
