A minority tradition has argued that the enthusiasm for information in biology has been a serious theoretical wrong turn, and that it fosters naive genetic determinism, other distortions of our understanding of the roles of interacting causes, or an implicitly dualist ontology. However, this sceptical response is fading, with key sceptics coming to accept a modest but genuine role for informational concepts in the life sciences. Others have taken the critique seriously but tried to distinguish legitimate appeals to information from misleading or erroneous ones.