John Baez

Biological and Bio-Inspired Information Theory, Banff International Research Station

October 29, 2014

Biodiversity, Entropy and Thermodynamics

The most popular measures of biodiversity are formally identical to the measures of entropy developed by Shannon, Rényi and others. This fits into a larger analogy between thermodynamics and the mathematics of biodiversity. For example, in certain models of evolutionary game theory, the amount of information the population has 'left to learn' is nonincreasing. This is mathematically analogous to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

You can see the slides for this talk, or a video.

For more, read:

• Lou Jost, Entropy and diversity.
• Marc Harper, The replicator equation as an inference dynamic.
• Marc Harper, Information geometry and evolutionary game theory.
• John Baez, Diversity, entropy and thermodynamics.
• John Baez, Information geometry, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12 and Part 13.

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