The Major Metaphors of Evolution by Salvatore J. Agosta & Daniel R. Brooks

Author:Salvatore J. Agosta & Daniel R. Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030520861
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

6.3.4 An Information View of Evolvable Life

To understand evolvable life from the standpoint of information, we first need to define “information” as a material phenomenon with a physical basis. At the beginning of formal information theory, information was defined statistically as deviations from an equiprobable distribution of variables making up any system (Shannon and Weaver 1949). If all letters of an alphabet occur at random with equal frequency in a long string, there can be no higher-order organization of letters into words, sentences, paragraphs, and so on. In this case, the system (the string of letters) is said to be at maximum entropy and there is no “information” in the system. Information is thus inversely related to the entropy (disorder) of the system. From this basis, statistical entropy functions were developed to measure the amount of entropy, H, in a system based on the number of different components (parts, pieces, states, etc.) and the relative distribution of these components. They take on the following generalized form:

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