ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Accumulation and maintenance of information in evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Invariant nonequilibrium dynamics in gene regulation optimize information flow.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Life as a Categorical Information-Handling System: An Evolutionary Information-Theoretic Model of the Holobiont.Biology · 2026Review
- Article
- Article
- Deriving a genetic regulatory network from an optimization principle.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Chromatin enables precise and scalable gene regulation with factors of limited specificity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Article
- The Intransitive Logic of Directed Cycles and Flipons Enhances the Evolution of Molecular Computers by Augmenting the Kolmogorov Complexity of Genomes.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- How Well Can We Infer Selection Benefits and Mutation Rates from Allele Frequencies?Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The "New Synthesis".Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
Selection accumulates information in the genome-it guides stochastically evolving populations toward states (genotype frequencies) that would be unlikely under neutrality. This can be quantified as the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the actual distribution of genotype frequencies and the corresponding neutral distribution. First, we show that this population-level information sets an upper bound on the information at the level of genotype and phenotype, limiting how precisely they can be specified by selection. Next, we study how the accumulation and maintenance of information is limited by the cost of selection, measured as the genetic load or the relative fitness variance, both of which we connect to the control-theoretic KL cost of control. The information accumulation rate is upper bounded by the population size times the cost of selection. This bound is very general, and applies across models (Wright-Fisher, Moran, diffusion) and to arbitrary forms of selection, mutation, and recombination. Finally, the cost of maintaining information depends on how it is encoded: Specifying a single allele out of two is expensive, but one bit encoded among many weakly specified loci (as in a polygenic trait) is cheap.
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