An Information Theoretic Decomposition of Fitness: Engineering the Communication Channels of Nature and Society
25 Pages Posted: 2 Apr 2015
Date Written: March 15, 2015
Abstract
Formal analyses in biology, ecology and economics typically bypass the intuitive interpretation of ‘fitness’ as environmental ‘fit’ and hastily equate fitness with the resulting rate of reproduction, economic pay-off, etc. But evolutionary growth also has a direct interpretation as environmental ‘fit’, as it can be expressed in terms of Shannon’s mutual information. This presents evolutionary change as a communication channel between the population and its environment. Optimal growth quantifies the amount of structure in the updated population that unequivocally comes from the environment. Turning this finding around, fitness can be optimized by searching for non-confusable signals between both. Full channel capacity is achieved with specialized types for each environmental state (noiseless channel). Just like technological communication channels thrive on source knowledge, fitness can be increased with environmental knowledge. This establishes a formal link between evolution in biological and social populations, and long-standing engineering efforts in the optimization of communication channels.
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