Thermodynamics + Natural Selection = Bayesian Inference
Populations and Evolution
2025-11-25 v1 Statistical Mechanics
Abstract
Consider a population of organisms that harvest free energy from their environment to reproduce. This paper shows that if the organisms' reproductive rates are proportional to the amount of physical free energy that they can convert into reproductive work, then the implicit probabilities that the organisms assign to environmental states are updated according to Bayes' rule.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.17641,
title = {Thermodynamics + Natural Selection = Bayesian Inference},
author = {Seth Lloyd},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.17641},
year = {2025}
}