So far we have mostly discussed the concept of information; there has not been much talk of “coding”. With the exception of our discussion of Bergstrom and Rosvall’s “transmission sense” of information, the discussion so far has not emphasised the distinctive features of the cell-level processes in which genes figure, such as the language-like combinatorial structure of the “genetic code”. These structural features of DNA and its relation to amino acids are not central to some of the ideas about information in biology, even when the focus is on development and inheritance. As noted above, the enthusiasm for semantic characterization of biological structures extends back before the genetic code was discovered (see Kay 2000 for a detailed historical treatment). But one line of thought in the literature, overlapping with the ideas above, has focused on the special features of genetic mechanisms, and on the idea of “genetic coding” as a contingent feature of these mechanisms.