Genetic drift

This study could be viewed as a kind of genealogy of the future, tracing the material, discursive, and social practices that contributed to the emergence and instantiations of the informational / scriptural visions of life, representations of heredity which animate the genomic future. But it is also a study of an epistemic rupture from purely material and energetic to an informational view of nature and society. We have seen that genes did not always transfer information, that these informational modes of reasoning were historically contingent. Up until around 1950, biologists described genetic mechanisms without ever using the term information (some, in fact, resisted its usage well into the 1960s and beyond); what had been transferred across biological space and time earlier was biological and chemical specificity. An overarching theme in the life sciences, specificity originated in an earlier historical epoch, a different biological world picture, and within the discourse of organization. Though often interchangeable, the two concepts -- specificity and information -- did not map directly onto each other; being historically situated, discourses seldom do. The discrepancies resided in the categorical difference between the two: specificity denoting material and structural properties; information denoting nonmaterial attributes, such as soul, potentialities, and form (telos), previously captured by the notion of organization and plan (logos). The genetic code had been widely viewed as the key to life's secret logos.

--Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford University Press, 2000, p. 328. ISBN 0804734178.