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Evolutionary informatics


Evolutionary informatics is a subfield of informatics addressing the practice of information processing in, and the engineering of information systems for, the study of biological evolution, as well as the study of information in evolutionary systems, natural and artificial.

Scientists have gathered an enormous volume of information on biological evolution, and there are problems in management of that information similar to those in bioinformatics and genomics. Indeed, bioinformatics and genomics are pertinent to the study of evolution, and utilization of information from those areas is of concern in evolutionary informatics.

The Evolutionary Informatics Lab defines:

Evolutionary informatics merges theories of evolution and information, thereby wedding the natural, engineering, and mathematical sciences. Evolutionary informatics studies how evolving systems incorporate, transform, and export information.

By comparison, the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics states:

Informatics studies the representation, processing, and communication of information in natural and engineered systems. [...] The central notion is the transformation of information - whether by computation or communication, whether by organisms or artifacts. [...] Computational systems, whether natural or engineered, are distinguished by their great complexity, as regards both their internal structure and behaviour, and their rich interaction with the environment. Informatics seeks to understand and to construct (or reconstruct) such systems, using analytic, experimental and engineering methodologies.

In 2006, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), sponsored by the National Science Foundation, funded the NESCent Evolutionary Informatics Working Group and conference series:

Though evolutionary biologists have developed powerful tools for inferring phylogenies, detecting selection, and so on, integrating evolutionary methodology into workflows in bioinformatics does not depend so much on the power of analysis tools as it does on a well-developed informatics infrastructure: software and standards for data exchange, visualization, input-and-output, editing, control, and storage-and-retrieval. We propose a working group to facilitate (directly and indirectly) the development of this infrastructure. Through a series of four meetings, each with presentations, discussion, and actual software development, the working group will build on the foundation provided by current analysis tools and available standards.


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