John Baez

NIMBioS Workshop: Information and Entropy

April 8, 2014

Information and Entropy in Biological Systems

Information and entropy are being used in biology in many different ways: for example, to study biological communication systems, the 'action-perception loop', the thermodynamic foundations of biology, the structure of ecosystems, measures of biodiversity, and evolution. Can we unify these? To do this, we must learn to talk to each other. This will be easier if we share some basic concepts which I'll sketch here.

You can see the slides for this talk here.

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.

home