Information science is the latest branch of science, developing in the the 20th century?

Darwin's civil war-era theory did not grasp the intricacies or the information implications of how genetics passes information to subsequent generations via DNA.

His focus was merely on primitive natural processes with no understanding of background processes required for those processes to operate in the first place. The development of genetics was why Neo-Darwinism had to be invented.

If the issue of origins was not already politically invested in, free thinkers would be looking for the or opinion of genetic information the same way we look for the origins of other types of data: from an intelligent being.

Formal information theory, not information science which can be traced back centuries through the field of cryptanalysis, most likely would not have predated thermodynamics, since it is integrally tied in with it. If it had somehow been stumbled upon at the time Gutenberg was trying out movable type, it would have solved a number of issues. Maxwell's demon (c. 1867) would have been less paradoxical, since the minimum energy needed to know the states in the thought experiment could be calculated.

As for its impact of biology, Shannon published the seminal paper on information theory was five years before Watson and Crick published the double helix. There might have been more of a focus on entropy increases and energetics as a driving force in cell information content, but since those quantities are so low relative to other energy processes in the cell, and the energy released in linking nucleotides far exceeds that necessary, the impact would be negligible. A comparable issue would be the question of the blood supply to the kidney: the kidney would work a a filter with 1% of its blood supply. Most of the energy is expended moving ions against their gradients. That is where the energy is expended. The energy difference might have been calculated based on the Maxwell's demon energy rather than using the Nernst equation.

> Information science is the latest branch of science, developing in the the 20th century?

False.

Think about the Dewey Decimal System. 1876.

But even before then, you can bet that librarians have always had some system for sorting incoming material, dating back to the earliest libraries.

Before then, there were accountants who kept track of crop yields for tax purposes -- and this sort of thing was going on before Aristotle.