ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2008
Top-down causation by information control: from a philosophical problem to a scientific research programme.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part One.Biological theory · 2026Article
- Whole-to-parts causation mechanism.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- How causal is "circular causality"?Frontiers in network physiology · 2026Article
- Aging as a Loss of Goal-Directedness: An Evolutionary Simulation and Analysis Unifying Regeneration with Anatomical Rejuvenation.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Associative conditioning in gene regulatory network models increases integrative causal emergence.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Impulsivity in ADHD and Borderline Personality Disorder: A Systematic Review of Gray and White Matter Variations.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Review
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates.Communications biology · 2024Review
- Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Informational architecture across non-living and living collectives.Theory in biosciences = Theorie in den Biowissenschaften · 2021Review
- Who's who inPeerJ · 2021Article
- Rethinking Causation for Data-intensive Biology: Constraints, Cancellations, and Quantized Organisms: Causality in complex organisms is sculpted by constraints rather than instigators, with outcomes perhaps better described by quantized patterns than rectilinear pathways.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2020Article
- The Cognitive Lens: a primer on conceptual tools for analysing information processing in developmental and regenerative morphogenesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
- Article
- The Dynamical Emergence of Biology From Physics: Branching Causation via Biomolecules.Frontiers in physiology · 2018Article
- Systems Medicine-Complexity Within, Simplicity Without.Journal of healthcare informatics research · 2017Article
- Top-down models in biology: explanation and control of complex living systems above the molecular level.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2016Review
- New scaling relation for information transfer in biological networks.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2015Article
- Knowing one's place: a free-energy approach to pattern regulation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2015Article
- The role of philosophy of science in Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI): the case of nanomedicine.Life sciences, society and policy · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
It has been claimed that different types of causes must be considered in biological systems, including top-down as well as same-level and bottom-up causation, thus enabling the top levels to be causally efficacious in their own right. To clarify this issue, the important distinctions between information and signs are introduced here and the concepts of information control and functional equivalence classes in those systems are rigorously defined and used to characterize when top-down causation by feedback control happens, in a way that is testable. The causally significant elements we consider are equivalence classes of lower level processes, realized in biological systems through different operations having the same outcome within the context of information control and networks.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.