Information Theory, Ecosystems, and Schrödinger’s Paradox

Abstract.  The goal of this working group is to follow up last year’s working group, bringing ourselves up to date on one another’s new insights into the deep issue of what processes, potentially thermodynamic in nature, drive the apparent rise in complexity of many systems, ranging from early life through ecosystems through social systems and up to the biosphere as a whole. Fields ranging from information theory to ecosystem modeling to phylogenetic tree reconstruction to cellular biology to algorithmic information theory to statistical physics in general (and the thermodynamics of computation in particular) all have a role to play in achieving this goal.