snps

I lectured this week in my Biology of Mind course about information theory, and in particular the concept of Shannon entropy. I’ve typed up a few notes for my students, and I’m cross-posting them on my own blog because they are relevant to another topic I’ll be writing about: discovery and testing of natural selection in the human genome. You see, the kind of data that are presently being collected as part of the International HapMap , single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), are naturally treated by information theoretic measures. So first, it may help to define the essential concepts of information theory.