Related papers: Minimal informational requirements for fitness
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…
One essential ingredient of evolutionary theory is the concept of fitness as a measure for a species' success in its living conditions. Here, we quantify the effect of environmental fluctuations onto fitness by analytical calculations on a…
All sequential decision-making agents explore so as to acquire knowledge about a particular target. It is often the responsibility of the agent designer to construct this target which, in rich and complex environments, constitutes a onerous…
The notion of information pervades informal descriptions of biological systems, but formal treatments face the problem of defining a quantitative measure of information rooted in a concept of fitness, which is itself an elusive notion.…
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 concept of fitness as a measure for a species's success in natural selection is central to the theory of evolution. We here investigate how reproduction rates which are not constant but vary in response to environmental fluctuations,…
Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, we develop a new information theory, in which it is not a coincidence that information and physical entropy share the same mathematical formula. It is an adaptation of mind to help search…
A population of individuals with the same genes can present heterogeneous traits (phenotypes). The prevalence of this heterogeneity can be explained as a bet-hedging strategy that improves the population proliferation rate (fitness) in…
The function of the organism hinges on the performance of its information-processing networks, which convey information via molecular recognition. Many paths within these networks utilize molecular codebooks, such as the genetic code, to…
A distinctive property of human and animal intelligence is the ability to form abstractions by neglecting irrelevant information which allows to separate structure from noise. From an information theoretic point of view abstractions are…
Information is increasingly being viewed as a resource used by organisms to increase their fitness. Indeed, it has been formally shown that there is a sensible way to assign a reproductive value to information and it is non-negative.…
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…
The concept of fitness is introduced, and a simple derivation of the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection (which states that the average fitness of a population increases if its variance is nonzero) is given. After a short discussion of…
In some rate-distortion-type problems, the required fidelity of information is affected by past actions. As a result, the distortion function depends not only on the instantaneous distortion between a source symbol and its representation…
Throughout the cognitive-science literature, there is widespread agreement that decision-making agents operating in the real world do so under limited information-processing capabilities and without access to unbounded cognitive or…
In this article we use rate-distortion theory, a branch of information theory devoted to the problem of lossy compression, to shed light on an important problem in latent variable modeling of data: is there room to improve the model? One…
A rate-distortion problem motivated by the consideration of semantic information is formulated and solved. The starting point is to model an information source as a pair consisting of an intrinsic state which is not observable,…
Phenotype-switching with and without sensing environment is a ubiquitous strategy of organisms to survive in fluctuating environment. Fitness of a population of organisms with phenotype-switching may be constrained and restricted by hidden…
We observe the propagation of information in a system of self-replicating strings of code (``Artificial Life'') as a function of fitness and mutation rate. Comparison with theoretical predictions based on the reaction-diffusion equation…