Field Jared M, Bonsall Michael B
Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology Mathematical Institute University of Oxford Oxford UK.
Mathematical Ecology Research Group Department of Zoology University of Oxford Oxford UK.
Ecol Evol. 2017 Nov 23;8(1):71-77. doi: 10.1002/ece3.3627. eCollection 2018 Jan.
Information is increasingly being viewed as a resource used by organisms to increase their fitness. Indeed, it has been formally shown that there is a sensible way to assign a reproductive value to information and it is non-negative. However, all of this work assumed that information collection is cost-free. Here, we account for such a cost and provide conditions for when the reproductive value of information will be negative. In these instances, counterintuitively, it is in the interest of the organism to remain ignorant. We link our results to empirical studies where Bayesian behavior appears to break down in complex environments and provide an alternative explanation of lowered arousal thresholds in the evolution of sleep.
信息越来越被视为生物体用来提高其适应性的一种资源。事实上，已经正式证明，存在一种合理的方法来赋予信息一个生殖价值，并且它是非负的。然而，所有这些工作都假定信息收集是无成本的。在这里，我们考虑了这样一种成本，并给出了信息的生殖价值何时为负的条件。在这些情况下，与直觉相反，保持无知符合生物体的利益。我们将我们的结果与经验研究联系起来，在这些研究中，贝叶斯行为在复杂环境中似乎会失效，并为睡眠进化中唤醒阈值降低提供了一种替代解释。
