Evolutionary rates of information gain and decay in fluctuating environments
This addresses the problem of understanding evolutionary adaptation in changing environments for researchers in evolutionary biology and information theory.
The paper investigates how evolving populations gain and lose information about their environments, predicting a crossover in fluctuating environments where fluctuations can either enhance or inhibit information capture based on timescales of information gain and decay.
In this paper, we wish to investigate the dynamics of information transfer in evolutionary dynamics. We use information theoretic tools to track how much information an evolving population has obtained and managed to retain about different environments that it is exposed to. By understanding the dynamics of information gain and loss in a static environment, we predict how that same evolutionary system would behave when the environment is fluctuating. Specifically, we anticipate a cross-over between the regime in which fluctuations improve the ability of the evolutionary system to capture environmental information and the regime in which the fluctuations inhibit it, governed by a cross-over in the timescales of information gain and decay.