Insights about collective decision-making at the genetic level

Abstract

By living in a collective, individuals can share and aggregate information to base their decisions on the many rather than on the one, thereby increasing accuracy. But a collective can also be defined at the molecular level. In the following, we reason that genes, by working collectively, share fundamental features with social organisms, which ends, without invoking cognition, in wiser responses. For that, we compile into a single picture the terms redundancy, stochastic resonance, intrinsic and extrinsic noise, and cross-regulation.

Keywords: Gene regulation; Genetic architecture; Heterogeneity; Information theory; Molecular noise; Redundancy; Systems biology.

Fig. 1

Graphical representation of decision-making at different levels of biological organization. There, environmental information is processed, either at the organismal (behavior), cellular (phenotype), or genetic (expression) level, to produce an adaptive response. A collective with heterogeneous information processing will make a more accurate decision by balancing different individual responses, provided that factors coordinating these responses, such as uncontrollable externality or cross-talk between individuals, are inconsequential