Even if not explicitly acknowledged, the "Book of Life" is largely a book about information. The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology talks about the "flow of information" from DNA via messages to proteins. In developmental biology, we think about cells in an organism that must decide which tissue to differentiate into: what "information" do cells use to reliably differentiate, even though their DNA is identical? In neuroscience, we think of neurons in our eyes as conveying the visual "information" about the outside world in real time to our brain: how can such wet hardware transmit a high-resolution movie at a rate that engineers tried for decades to replicate in our mobile phones? In evolutionary biology, we think of "information" stored in our genomes: how can it be accumulated via selection and maintained in the face of mutation and drift across generations? In this talk, I will outline how we can re-formulate such conceptual questions into quantitative and predictive theories at the interface of physics, information theory, and biology. 

If you wish to attend this seminar online, please send an email to m.t.pham@uva.nl to receive the Zoom link.