Information Theory, Ecosystems, and Schrodinger's Paradox

The goal of this working group is to bring new insights to bear on the deep and age-old 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.