Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code by Lily E. Kay

This is definitely a post-modernist history of the genetic code. It is an account of the metaphors of code, book, word, world and the account of John "in the beginning was the word (world)." The section on linguistics is interesting if arcane. Chomsky, Von Neumann and Gamov all had interesting contributions but the history is not presented as history but rather as competing or complementary narratives. In spite of this post-modernistic bent it brings up interesting questions about information, codes, ciphers, language context, analogy, proteins as information carriers. Meaning and its contrast to the mathematics of information. Perhaps we could say it comes down to bits and being.