So the argument in Godfrey-Smith (2000) and Griffiths (2001) is that there is one kind of informational or semantic property that genes and only genes have: coding for the amino acid sequences of protein molecules. But this relation “reaches” only as far as the amino acid sequence. It does not vindicate the idea that genes code for whole-organism phenotypes, let alone provide a basis for the wholesale use of informational or semantic language in biology.  Genes can have a reliable causal role in the production of a whole-organism phenotype, of course. But if this causal relation is to be described in informational terms, then it is a matter of ordinary Shannon information, which applies to environmental factors as well. That said, it is possible to argue that the specificity of gene action, and the existence of an array of actual and possible alternatives at a given site on a chromosome, means that genes exert fine-grained causal control over phenotypes, and that few other developmental resources exert this form of causal control (Waters 2007; Maclaurin 1998; Stegmann 2014). In contrast, Griffiths and Stotz (2013) say that these other factors are often a source of “Crick information”, as they contribute to specifying the linear sequence of a gene product.  We return to this issue in section 6.