Physics 434, 2012: Block two: Information theory in biological signaling
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Back to Physics 434, 2012: Information Processing in Biology.
The main ideas we discussed in block one are:
- Information theory is a natural language to quantify information processing in biological systems, just like it is for human-engineered systems.
- Maximizing information available about the outside world is crucial for an organism survival, as indicated by the relation of the population growth rate to available information.
- Noise in biological systems limits the quality of information transmission.
- Information-theoretic quantities allow us to identify quantities that need to be included in a quantitative description of the system.