The Evolution of Biological Information: How Evolution Creates Complexity, from Viruses to Brains

✍ Scribed by Christoph Adami

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 585
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Why information is the unifying principle that allows us to understand the evolution of complexity in nature

More than 150 years after Darwin’s revolutionary On the Origin of Species, we are still attempting to understand and explain the amazing complexity of life. Although we now know how evolution proceeds to build complexity from simple ingredients, quantifying this complexity is still a difficult undertaking. In this book, Christoph Adami offers a new perspective on Darwinian evolution by viewing it through the lens of information theory. This novel theoretical stance sheds light on such matters as how viruses evolve drug resistance, how cells evolve to communicate, and how intelligence evolves. By this account, information emerges as the central unifying principle behind all of biology, allowing us to think about the origin of life—on Earth and elsewhere—in a systematic manner.

Adami, a leader in the field of computational biology, first provides an accessible introduction to the information theory of biomolecules and then shows how to apply these tools to measure information stored in genetic sequences and proteins. After outlining the experimental evidence of the evolution of information in both bacteria and digital organisms, he describes the evolution of robustness in viruses; the cooperation among cells, animals, and people; and the evolution of brains and intelligence. Building on extensive prior work in bacterial and digital evolution, Adami establishes that (expanding on Dobzhansky’s famous remark) nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of information. Understanding that information is the foundation of all life, he argues, allows us to see beyond the particulars of our way of life to glimpse what life might be like in other worlds.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Principles and Origins of Darwinism
1.1 Principles of Darwinian Theory
1.2 Origin of Darwinian Thought
1.3 Summary
2. Information Theory in Biology
2.1 Random Variables and Probabilities
2.2 Entropy and Information
2.3 Information Content of Genes
2.4 Information Channels and Communication
2.5 Summary
3. Evolution of Information
3.1 Evolution as a Maxwell Demon
3.2 Evolution of Information on the Line of Descent
3.3 Information Loss and Gain in HIV Evolution
3.4 Evolution of Information in DNA Binding Sites
3.5 Summary
4. Experiments in Evolution
4.1 The Dallinger Experiment
4.2 The Lenski Experiment
4.3 Digital Life: A Brief History
4.4 Promises and Rewards of Experimental Evolution
4.5 Summary
5. Evolution of Complexity
5.1 What Is Complexity?
5.2 Complexity of Networks, Modules, and Motifs
5.3 Long-Term Trends in Evolution
5.4 Short-Term Trends in the Evolution of a Single Lineage
5.5 Summary
6. Evolution of Robustness
6.1 The Neutral Theory of Evolution
6.2 Evolution of Mutational Robustness
6.3 Evolution of Drift Robustness
6.4 Mutational and Drift Robustness in Trypanosomes
6.5 Summary
7. The Informational Origins of Life
7.1 The RNA World
7.2 The Likelihood of Information
7.3 Experiments with Digital Abiogenesis
7.4 The Fitness Landscape before Evolution
7.5 Summary
8. Information for Cooperation
8.1 Evolutionary Game Theory
8.2 Strategies That Communicate
8.3 Quasi-Strategies
8.4 Summary
9. The Making of Intelligence
9.1 Intelligence by Design or Evolution
9.2 Elements of Intelligence
9.3 Evolution of Intelligence
9.4 A Future with Sentient Machines
9.5 Summary
10. The Many Roles of Information in Biology
10.1 Life as Information
10.2 The Power of Communication
10.3 Predicting the Future
10.4 Summary
References
Index