““But perhaps an even greater principle was at stake, Bateson realized. The flow of biological information was not restricted to heredity. It was coursing through all of biology. The transmission of hereditary traits was just one instance of information flow-but if you looked deeply, squinting your conceptual lenses, it was easy to imagine information moving pervasively through the entire living world. The unfurling of an embryo; the reach of a plant toward sunlight; the ritual dance of bees-every biological activity required the decoding of coded instructions. Might Mendel, then, have also stumbled on the essential structure of these instructions? Were units of information guiding each of these processes? "Each of us who now looks at his own patch of work sees Mendel's clues running through it," Bateson proposed. "We have only touched the edge of that new country which is stretching out before us....The experimental study of heredity...is second to no branch of science in the magnitude of the results it offers.””
