 The notion of replication arose as a concern in the period immediately after the Second World War (see  Figure 1),  with the rise of information theory, communication theory, cybernetics, and Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What is Life? Biologists immediately began to consider the informational aspect of life, in each of these theoretical frameworks, in areas ranging from neurology to molecular biology, but especially the latter (Brookes 1956; Eigen &amp; de Maeyer 1966; Gatlin 1972; Johnson 1970; Linschitz 1953; Margalef 1957 [1958]; Quastler 1953; Rashevsky 1955). It was only after the development of communications theory by Shannon (1948) and cybernetics by Wiener (1948) after it that inheritance in biology took on a specifically informational tint (Griffiths &amp; Stotz 2007). This is the case in particular of the work of Watson and Crick on the double helix structure of DNA (Watson &amp; Crick 1953), as well as Crick’s Central Dogma, which states that information cannot flow from protein to DNA. The Central Dogma (Crick 1958) was initially cast in terms of structural information (Šustar 2007;  Figure 2) and  later recast by Crick as a more cybernetic or computational kind of information (Crick 1970). [See Eugene V. Koonin 2012 &amp; 2015 for discussion of the nature of the Central Dogma in current biology.]