![]() Here Shannon’s original concept of entropy naturally generalizes to ‘Rényi entropy’, which depends on a parameter. Thus, a second goal of this workshop is to familiarize all the participants with applications of the Ma圎nt method to ecology, compare it with competing approaches, and study whether Ma圎nt provides a sufficient justification for the principle of Maximum Entropy Production.Įntropy is not merely a predictive tool in ecology: it is also widely used as a measure of biodiversity. Dewar has also used Ma圎nt in ecology, and he has argued that it underlies the principle of Maximum Entropy Production. Annette Ostling is an expert on other theories that attempt to explain the same data, such as the ‘neutral model’. Recently John Harte has applied Ma圎nt in this way to ecology, using it to make specific testable predictions for the distribution, abundance and energy usage of species across spatial scales and across habitats and taxonomic groups. He noted that it is already implicit in the procedures of statistical mechanics, but convincingly argued that it can also be applied to situations where entropy is more ‘informational’ than ‘thermodynamic’ in character. Ma圎nt was first explicitly advocated by Jaynes. ![]() While they may be related, the principle of Maximum Entropy Production should not be confused with the Ma圎nt inference procedure, which says that we should choose the probabilistic hypothesis with the highest entropy subject to the constraints provided by our data. The first goal of this workshop is to study the validity of this principle. He has also sought to derive this principle from ideas in statistical mechanics, but it remains controversial. Along with others, he has applied this principle to make testable predictions in a wide range of biological systems, from ATP synthesis to respiration and photosynthesis of individual plants and plant communities. Roderick Dewar is a key advocate of the principle of Maximum Entropy Production, which says that biological systems-and indeed all open, non-equilibrium systems-act to produce entropy at the maximum rate. In what follows, participants’ names are in boldface, while the main goals of the workshop are in italics. The aim of the workshop is to do just this. information and the thermodynamics of individual cells.īecause they work in diverse fields, researchers in these specific topics have had little opportunity to trade insights and take stock of the progress so far.information theory in evolutionary game theory,.Shannon and Rényi entropies as measures of biodiversity,.the maximum entropy principle in ecology,.But applications of information theory and entropy to specific highly focused topics in biology have been increasingly successful, such as: Premature attempts at ‘grand syntheses’ have often misfired. ![]() However, the subject is full of conceptual pitfalls for the unwary, and progress has been slower than initially expected. ![]() The link between information and entropy was noted very early on, and it suggested that a full thermodynamic understanding of biology would naturally involve the information processing and storage that are characteristic of living organisms. Ever since Shannon initiated research on information theory in 1948, there have been hopes that the concept of information could serve as a tool to help systematize and unify work in biology. ![]()
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