Related papers: Ignorance can be evolutionarily beneficial
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
It is commonly-accepted wisdom that more information is better, and that information should never be ignored. Here we argue, using both a Bayesian and a non-Bayesian analysis, that in some situations you are better off ignoring information…
It is commonly-accepted wisdom that more information is better, and that information should never be ignored. Here we argue, using both a Bayesian and a non-Bayesian analysis, that in some situations you are better off ignoring information…
Information is a key concept in evolutionary biology. Information is stored in biological organism's genomes, and used to generate the organism as well as to maintain and control it. Information is also "that which evolves". When a…
There are two contrasting explanations of sleep: as a proximate, essential physiological function or as an adaptive state of inactivity and these hypotheses remain widely debated. To investigate the adaptive significance of sleep, we…
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…
This paper studies the value of a firm's internal information when the firm faces an adverse selection problem arising from unobservable managerial abilities. While more precise information allows the firm to make ex post more efficient…
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…
Biologists measure information in different ways. Neurobiologists and researchers in bioinformatics often measure information using information-theoretic measures such as Shannon's entropy or mutual information. Behavioral biologists and…
The existing concept of the "fitness value of information" provides a theoretical upper bound on the fitness advantage of using information concerning a fluctuating environment. Using concepts from rate-distortion theory, we develop a…
Integrating information gained by observing others via Social Bayesian Learning can be beneficial for an agent's performance, but can also enable population wide information cascades that perpetuate false beliefs through the agent…
Biological information processing manifests a huge variety in its complexity and capability among different organisms, which presumably stems from the evolutionary optimization under limited computational resources. Starting from the…
The ability of organisms to accurately sense their environment and respond accordingly is critical for evolutionary success. However, exactly how the sensory ability influences fitness is a topic of active research, while the necessity of a…
More often than not, bad decisions are bad regardless of where and when they are made. Information sharing might thus be utilized to mitigate them. Here we show that sharing the information about strategy choice between players residing on…
Biological organisms adapt to changes by processing informations from different sources, most notably from their ancestors and from their environment. We review an approach to quantify these informations by analyzing mathematical models of…
In complex environments, there are costs to both ignorance and perception. An organism needs to track fitness-relevant information about its world, but the more information it tracks, the more resources it must devote to memory and…
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…
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different…
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…
Emerging empirical and theoretical thinking about human aging places considerable value upon the role of the environment as a major factor which can promote prolonged healthy longevity. Our contemporary, information-rich environment is…