Last time I mentioned that estimating entropy from real-world
data is important not just for measuring biodiversity, but also
for another area of biology: neurobiology! When you look at
something, neurons in your eye start firing. But how, exactly,
is their firing related to what you see? Questions like this are
hard! Answering them— ‘cracking the neural code’—is a big
challenge. To make progress, neuroscientists are using
information theory. But as I explained last time, estimating
information from experimental data is tricky. Romain Brasselet,
now a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Biological
Cybernetics at Tübingen, is working on these topics. He sent me
a nice email explaining this area. This is a bit of a
digression, but the Mathematics of Biodiversity program in
Barcelona has been extraordinarily multidisciplinary, with
category theorists rubbing shoulders with ecologists,
immunologists and geneticists. One of the common themes is
entropy and its role in biology, so I think it’s worth posting
Rom