The informational turn in anthropogenesis: Integrating thermodynamic foundations with evolutionary mechanisms

Walker's "Homo informatio" (Walker, 2025) and Deacon's recent work on grounding information in thermodynamics (Deacon, 2025) together mark a significant "informational turn" in the study of anthropogenesis. This paper provides a systematic comparative analysis of these two landmark contributions, examining their theoretical foundations, core mechanisms, and complementary relationships. Deacon offers a naturalistic grounding for information and meaning rooted in thermodynamic work and constraint, explaining what information fundamentally is and how symbolic meaning can be physically anchored. Walker provides an evolutionary mechanistic framework that integrates paleoanthropological evidence with theoretical constructs such as small-world networks, zones of bounded surprisal (ZBS), and active inference, explaining how human information-processing capacities evolved. Despite their different entry points-philosophical grounding versus evolutionary reconstruction-these theories share a common naturalistic paradigm that transcends classical Shannon information theory by insisting that information possesses referentiality and normativity. We argue that their integration yields a complete explanatory chain from physical constraints to human uniqueness: Deacon's "displaced grounding" through cultural practice provides the theoretical foundation for the "survival information" and "constructive information" that circulate through Walker's evolutionary model. Together, these frameworks illuminate how humans became both the "symbolic species" and "Homo informatio"-creatures uniquely defined by their capacity for information and meaning.