Pedro Bolanho Mendes

Doutorado | 2° ano

pbolanhom@gmail.com


Orientador

Walter A. P. Boeger


Coorientador

Sabrina Borges Lino Araújo

The Information Content of Populations

The transmission of information across generations is one of the central problems in evolutionary biology. Classical mathematical formalism in evolution often assumes that genes are the only inheritable element of phenotypes, neglecting epigenetic mechanisms. The information space is a concept derived from the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, which accounts for any route of inheritance in a given population or species. The concept of information space helps us to understand the role of uncertainty in the complex network of biological interactions. However, we still lack a proper mathematical formalism for this concept. Such lack of formalism hinders our understanding of how populations acquire and transmit information and how the information space evolves. Here, we explore the idea of the population’s information space and propose a mathematical formulation for it. We use a deductive approach grounded in the original definition of the information space and on the assumptions of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. Moreover, we use our formalism to explore how natural selection may shape the information space. We found that, mathematically, the population’s information space may be regarded as a set of multivariate distributions describing the population’s phenotypic state. In the absence of selection, the content of the information space tends to increase but is constrained by trait correlations. When natural selection is present, the information space decreases its content, but the mutual information between the information space and environment may increase. Furthermore, we show how our findings connect with the current theory of evolutionary dynamics (e.g. fundamental theorems, quantitative genetics, eco-evolutionary dynamics).
Pedro_BolanhoMendes_Poster_D_2_2020.pdf