Physics 434, 2012: Block two: Information theory in biological signaling

From Ilya Nemenman: Theoretical Biophysics @ Emory
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Back to Physics 434, 2012: Information Processing in Biology.

The main ideas we discussed in block one are:

  1. Information theory is a natural language to quantify information processing in biological systems, just like it is for human-engineered systems.
  2. 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.
  3. Noise in biological systems limits the quality of information transmission.
  4. Information-theoretic quantities allow us to identify quantities that need to be included in a quantitative description of the system.