Related papers: Essential conditions for evolution of communicatio…
In computer science, we can theoretically neatly separate transmission and processing of information, hardware and software, and programs and their inputs. This is much more intricate in biology, Nevertheless, I argue that Shannon's concept…
The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…
Non-binding communication is common in daily life and crucial for fostering cooperation, even though it has no direct payoff consequences. However, despite robust empirical evidence, its evolutionary basis remains poorly understood. Here,…
Emergent communication protocols among humans and artificial neural network agents do not yet share the same properties and show some critical mismatches in results. We describe three important phenomena with respect to the emergence and…
The ability of biological and artificial collectives to outperform solitary individuals in a wide variety of tasks depends crucially on the efficient processing of social and environmental information at the level of the collective. Here,…
Shannon's information entropy measures of the uncertainty of an event's outcome. If learning about a system reflects a decrease in uncertainty, then a plausible intuition is that learning should be accompanied by a decrease in the entropy…
Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be "obvious" and "enormous". If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to…
Human language is still an embarrassment for evolutionary theory, as the speaker's benefit remains unclear. The willingness to communicate information is shown here to be an evolutionary stable strategy (ESS), even if acquiring original…
In the 21st century, many of the crucial scientific and technical issues facing humanity can be understood as problems associated with understanding, modelling, and ultimately controlling complex systems: systems comprised of a large number…
Recent research has identified interactions between networks as crucial for the outcome of evolutionary games taking place on them. While the consensus is that interdependence does promote cooperation by means of organizational complexity…
Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…
We discuss a simple model of co-evolution. In order to emphasise the effect of interaction between individuals the entire population is subjected to the same physical environment. Species are emergent structures and extinction, origination…
We consider the concept of mutual information in ecological networks, and use this idea to analyse the Tangled Nature model of co-evolution. We show that this measure of correlation has two distinct behaviours depending on how we define the…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
The long-term growth rate of populations in varying environments quantifies the evolutionary value of processing the information that biological individuals inherit from their ancestors and acquire from their environment. Previous models…
Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism by which individuals cooperate with those who have cooperated with others. This creates a regime in which repeated interactions are not necessary to incent cooperation (as would be required for direct…
We examine the evolution of expression patterns and the organization of genetic information in populations of self-replicating digital organisms. Seeding the experiments with a linearly expressed ancestor, we witness the development of…
"Standard" information theory says nothing about the semantic content of information. Nevertheless, applications such as evolutionary theory demand consideration of precisely this aspect of information, a need that has motivated a largely…
Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…
This article introduces the physics of information in the context of molecular biology and genomics. Entropy and information, the two central concepts of Shannon's theory of information and communication, are often confused with each other…