Information and Entropy in Biological Systems (Part 5)

John Harte of U. C. Berkeley spoke about the maximum entropy method as a method of predicting patterns in ecology. Annette Ostling of the University of Michigan spoke about some competing theories, such as the ‘neutral model’ of biodiversity—a theory that sounds much too simple to be right, yet fits the data surprisingly well!

We managed to get a video of Ostling’s talk, but not Harte’s. Luckily, you can see the slides of both. You can also see a summary of Harte’s book Maximum Entropy and Ec...