Shannon information and biological fitness Export

@inproceedings{citeulike:840771, abstract = {When studying information, biologists and behavioral scientists often eschew Shannon entropy. Instead, they commonly use a decision-theoretic measure of the value of information, on the grounds that Shannon's measure draws no distinction between useful and useless information. Here we show that these two measures are intimately related in the context of biological evolution. We present a simple model of evolution in an uncertain environment, and calculate the increase in Darwinian fitness that is made possible by information about the environmental state. This fitness increase - the fitness value of information - is a composite of both the Shannon entropy and the decision-theoretic measure of information value. Furthermore, the Shannon entropy of the environment, which seemingly fails to take anything about Darwinian fitness into account, nonetheless imposes an upper bound on the fitness value of information.}, author = {Bergstrom, C. T. and Lachmann, M.}, citeulike-article-id = {840771}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ITW.2004.1405273}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1405273}, doi = {10.1109/ITW.2004.1405273}, journal = {Information Theory Workshop, 2004. IEEE}, keywords = {entropy, fitness, information}, pages = {50--54}, posted-at = {2007-10-12 17:06:17}, priority = {0}, title = {Shannon information and biological fitness}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ITW.2004.1405273}, year = {2004} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:840771 L3 - citeulike-article-id:840771 N2 - When studying information, biologists and behavioral scientists often eschew Shannon entropy. Instead, they commonly use a decision-theoretic measure of the value of information, on the grounds that Shannon's measure draws no distinction between useful and useless information. Here we show that these two measures are intimately related in the context of biological evolution. We present a simple model of evolution in an uncertain environment, and calculate the increase in Darwinian fitness that is made possible by information about the environmental state. This fitness increase - the fitness value of information - is a composite of both the Shannon entropy and the decision-theoretic measure of information value. Furthermore, the Shannon entropy of the environment, which seemingly fails to take anything about Darwinian fitness into account, nonetheless imposes an upper bound on the fitness value of information. JF - Information Theory Workshop, 2004. IEEE EP - 54 TI - Shannon information and biological fitness SP - 50 KW - entropy KW - fitness KW - information AU - Bergstrom, CT AU - Lachmann, M PY - 2004/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ITW.2004.1405273 ER -