Carl Bergstrom: University of Washington Dept. of Biology

Over the past 3.5 billion years, biological organisms have evolved to acquire, process, store, and transmit information. How have organisms evolved to handle the same problems with which we are confronted in this so-called Information Age: problems of information storage and processing, problems of transmission and reliability, problems of trust and deception? For all the attention that is directed toward the changing conception of information and its function in our world, remarkably little is known about the broad role of information in biological systems.

In dealing with information, similar strategic problems are faced across levels of organization. Moreover, a similar process – evolution
by natural selection – has generated the solutions that we observe. I argue for the value of a comparative theoretical approach to understanding the problems inherent in information handling, using examples at scales from intracellular regulation to human communication.
http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/signalling/peacock.pdf