Information theory and the phenotypic complexity of evolutionary adaptations and innovations

Two main lines of research link information theory to evolutionary biology. The first focuses on organismal phenotypes, and on the information that organisms acquire about their environment. The second connects information-theoretic concepts to genotypic change. The genotypic and phenotypic level can be linked by experimental high-throughput genotyping and computational models of genotype-phenotype relationships. I here use a simple information-theoretic framework to compute a phenotypes information content (its phenotypic complexity), and the information gain or change that comes with a new phenotype. I apply this framework to experimental data on DNA-binding phenotypes of multiple transcri