from Hacker News

Information Theory and the Foundation of Life

by alexwg on 1/26/17, 10:55 PM with 12 comments

  • by malgorithms on 1/28/17, 11:41 PM

    > Aging, too, has conventionally been seen as a trait dictated by evolution. Organisms have a lifespan that creates opportunities to reproduce, the story goes, without inhibiting the survival prospects of offspring by the parents sticking around too long and competing for resources.

    Can someone with more bio expertise explain this theory to me? I've heard it said before, but it doesn't seem right to me. Some species disperse widely, and the offspring end up far from their parents, not really competing for resources. Wouldn't such species evolve quickly not to age, if possible? Similarly, wouldn't it be far better for non-migrating species not to age but instead evolve to migrate when old?

    It seems intuitive to me that keeping an old body from falling apart takes great resources / evolutionary focus, and there are diminishing returns the further out the age. e.g.,., if a species were only 1% likely to make it to old age T in the wild, then it would be hard to select for traits that led to it being in good shape at that age.

  • by breck on 1/28/17, 8:05 PM

    If you liked this article, you'd probably also enjoy the book "The Information", by James Gleick.

  • by pjdorrell on 1/28/17, 11:16 PM

    I believe I might have been the first person to correctly analyse the thermodynamics of evolution by natural selection: http://thinkinghard.com/evolution/2ndlaw.html (originally http://web.archive.org/web/19961221074218/http://www.xmissio...).

  • by outlace on 1/29/17, 12:41 AM

    I wonder if this can also explain the variable success of different societies and cultures. Perhaps societies in environments of greater disequilibrium will "evolve" cultures that most efficiently model their environments and thus are most efficient at dissipating energy and hence increasing the external global entropy.

  • by pizza on 1/29/17, 3:01 AM

    I would like to see a new approach to/insights from this idea using the Fluctuation Theorem. Maybe even in the language of David Deutsch's constructor theory..!

    (I can already hear the scorn)