The free energy requirements of biological organisms; implications for evolution

Abstract

Recent advances in nonequilibrium statistical physics have provided unprecedented insight into the thermodynamics of dynamic processes. The author recently used these advances to extend Landauer's semi-formal reasoning concerning the thermodynamics of bit erasure, to derive the minimal free energy required to implement an arbitrary computation. Here, I extend this analysis, deriving the minimal free energy required by an organism to run a given (stochastic) map $\pi$ from its sensor inputs to its actuator outputs. I use this result to calculate the input-output map $\pi$ of an organism that optimally trades off the free energy needed to run $\pi$ with the phenotypic fitness that results from implementing $\pi$. I end with a general discussion of the limits imposed on the rate of the terrestrial biosphere's information processing by the flux of sunlight on the Earth.

19 pages, 0 figures, presented at 2015 NIMBIoS workshop on "Information and entropy in biological systems"

References in corpus (7)

• Work and information processing in a solvable model of Maxwell's demon
• The thermodynamics of prediction
• Thermodynamic costs of information processing in sensory adaption
• Natural selection maximizes Fisher information
• Stochastic thermodynamics with information reservoirs
• Information and fitness
• Energetics of the brain and AI

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Stochastic thermodynamics of computation
• The thermodynamic efficiency of computations made in cells across the range of life
• Thermodynamics of computing with circuits
• Dependence of dissipation on the initial distribution over states
• Number of hidden states needed to physically implement a given conditional distribution
• A space-time tradeoff for implementing a function with master equation dynamics
• First passage time and information of a one-dimensional Brownian particle with stochastic resetting to random positions
• Weak universality in sensory tradeoffs
• Multiverse Predictions for Habitability: Fraction of Planets that Develop Life
• Fate of Duplicated Neural Structures
• Jarzyski's equality and Crooks' fluctuation theorem for general Markov chains with application to decision-making systems