Reviews for Information theory and the living system

The average rating for Information theory and the living system based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-03-18 00:00:00 Kristina Petersen This is a fantastic book which, for the majority of people, I'd give a five star review. For my own purposes, however, I was expecting far more on the theoretical side of information theory and statistical mechanics as applied to microbiology that it didn't live up to, so I'm giving it three stars from a purely personal perspective. I do wish that someone had placed it in my hands and forced me to read it when I was a freshman in college entering the study of biomedical and electrical engineering. It is far more an impressive book at this level and for those in the general public who are interested in the general history of science and philosophy of the topics. The general reader may be somewhat scared by a small amount of mathematics in chapter 4, but there is really no loss of continuity by skimming through most of it. For those looking for a bit more rigor, Avery provides some additional details in appendix A, but for the specialist, the presentation is heavily lacking. The book opens with a facile but acceptable overview of the history of the development for the theory of evolution whereas most other texts would simply begin with Darwin's work and completely skip the important philosophical and scientific contributions of Aristotle, Averroes, Condorcet, Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, or the debates between Cuvier and St. Hilaire. For me, the meat of the book was chapters 3-5 and appendix A which collectively covered molecular biology, evolution, statistical mechanics, and a bit of information theory, albeit from a very big picture point of view. Unfortunately the rigor of the presentation and the underlying mathematics were skimmed over all too quickly to accomplish what I had hoped to gain from the text. On the other hand, the individual sections of "suggestions for further reading" throughout the book seem well researched and offer an acceptable launching pad for delving into topics in places where they may be covered more thoroughly. The final several chapters become a bit more of an overview of philosophy surrounding cultural evolution and information technology which are much better covered and discussed in James Gleick's recent book The Information. Overall, Avery has a well laid out outline of the broad array of subjects and covers it all fairly well in an easy to read and engaging style.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-02-05 00:00:00 Lawrence Reiman This is a short book, and well suited to complete beginners in Information Theory. There is some quite complex maths, but this can be skipped if you are willing to accept it. Why has life really increased in complexity? What is going on in terms of genetic information, and what can the laws of entropy and information entropy tell us about this? There is quite a bit of controversy in terms of whether or how the two types of entropy are related, and the book helps to clarify certain aspects of this problem. But there's a lot more depth to be explored.