Marcello Barbieri

Marcello Barbieri (born 1940) is an Italian theoretical biologist at the University of Ferrara whose main interest is the origin of novelties in macroevolution.

[6] At the Max-Planck-Institut in Berlin, Barbieri obtained the largest microcrystals of eukaryotic ribosomes that have ever appeared in the scientific literature.

[7] At the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, and at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, he developed mathematical models for the reconstruction of structures from incomplete information and has shown that a convergent increase in complexity is possible if the reconstructions are performed with iterative methods that make use of memories and codes.

[10] He has been described as one of 'key figures' in biosemiotics by Donald Favareau in Essential Readings,[4] by Liz Else in New Scientist[11] and by Nigel Williams in Current Biology.

[12] Barbieri underlined that copying and coding are two fundamentally different mechanisms of molecular change and suggested that there are two distinct mechanisms of evolutionary change: evolution by natural selection, based on copying, and evolution by natural conventions, based on coding.