Infomation and Evolution

Ongoing research on mutation variability seeks to explain a quantifiable aspect of the evolutionary process. In this talk, we offer an explanation that asexual populations' mutation rates are modified by mutator alleles to maximize information about their population. We consider the Wright-Fisher evolutionary model as the environment-population channel and compute its channel capacity to be 2 bits per allele. In addition, we find a lack of support for our hypothesis through a comparison between the expected mutation rate distribution and Red Yeast mutation rate distribution. We propose a study to experimentally test that asexual populations do not maximize information about their environment.