Related papers: The fitness value of information
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.…
Most psychophysical experiments discard half the data collected. Specifically, experiments discard reaction time data, and use binary responses (e.g. yes/no) to measure performance. Here, Shannon's information theory is used to define…
One of the hallmarks of biological organisms is their ability to integrate disparate information sources to optimize their behavior in complex environments. How this capability can be quantified and related to the functional complexity of…
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…
Mutual information and its causal variant, directed information, have been widely used to quantitatively characterize the performance of biological sensing and information transduction. However, once coupled with selection in response to…
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 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…
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…
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…
A major obstacle in analyzing the evolution of information exchange and processing is our insufficient understanding of the underlying signaling and decision-making biological mechanisms. For instance, it is unclear why are humans unique in…
Information theory provides a mathematical foundation to measure uncertainty in belief. Belief is represented by a probability distribution that captures our understanding of an outcome's plausibility. Information measures based on…
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…
Shannon information has, in the past, been applied to quantify the genetic diversity of many natural populations. Here, we apply the Shannon concept to consecutive generations of alleles as they evolve over time. We suppose a genetic system…
The dynamics of populations is rich, taking into account that both, the individual's actions and the population's fitness are coupled. The way in which an individual chooses a strategy depends off course on the interaction with other…
Shannon mutual information provides a measure of how much information is, on average, contained in a set of neural activities about a set of stimuli. It has been extensively used to study neural coding in different brain areas. To apply a…
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.…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
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…
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…