Use and abuse of entropy in biology: A case for caliber

Abstract

Here, I discuss entropy and its use as a tool in fields of biology such as bioenergetics, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Statistical entropy concepts including Shannon’s diversity, configurational entropy, and informational entropy are discussed in connection to their use in describing the diversity, heterogeneity, and spatial patterning of biological systems. The use of entropy as a measure of biological complexity is also discussed, and I explore the extension of thermodynamic entropy principles to open, nonequilibrium systems operating in finite time. I conclude with suggestions for use of caliber, a metric similar to entropy but for time-dependent trajectories rather than static distributions, and propose the complementary notion of path information.