ABSTRACT
The most popular account of genetic information in contemporary philosophy is 'teleosemantics'. Physically identical genes can have entirely different information content if they evolved due to different selective pressures. Teleosemantics, in contrast, implies that the evolution of any novel character begins without any genetic information about that character being present. This chapter reviews teleosemantics, and shows how it may play a role in 'ultimate biology' that complements other notions of genetic information in 'proximate biology'. Woodward's account of causal specificity is part of a larger program to analyze the idea of causation as it figures in the practice of the special sciences, including biology. Crick's Central Dogma and Sequence Hypothesis were based on a very simple picture of how the specificity of biomolecules is encoded in living cells. 'Epigenesis' is the ancient idea that the outcomes of biological development are created during the process of development, not preformed in the inputs to development.
