  To capture the conventional ideas about genetic information under this theory, genes are treated as source variables and environments are treated as channel conditions. It follows that genes carry information about phenotypes because phenotypic values reliably correlate with genotypic values. But as Griffiths points out, nothing stops one from treating environmental conditions as source variables and genes as channel. Under this application of the causal theory, environmental conditions carry information about phenotypes. Griffiths and others have concluded that the idea that genes provide the information while other causal factors merely provide material cannot be sustained under causal theories of information.