Causal explanations have not been well explicated. The main question is how explanations provided intelligible unity or coherency. Many explanations provided in the biological and neurosciences (as well as elsewhere) refer to mechanisms that carry information. Some philosophers and scientists have tried to explicate a concept of information as used in these contexts. Most of the time, they have taken information as a semantic property (Black, Millikan, Dretske, Stegmann). Others have declared the whole notion confused and vacuous (Griffiths). We argue that information provides explanatory unity. We distinguish three different legitimate uses of information, only one of which is semantic. I shall explicate the idea of mechanical information, a non-semantic notion, which is often used to provide explanations, and show how it is that the concept of information provides coherency among various stages of a mechanism through an appeal to various forms of teleology.