Entropy vs. human ontogeny: the Shannon information measure; a reliable general indicator of human health?

ABSTRACT

A measure of health based on exact sciences is not considered by social sciences to evaluate human development. We propose the H measure of information of Shannon ([1948]. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The Bell Systems Technical Journal 27 (3): 379–423, 623–656), renamed as H _cto, as a general indicator of human health which can be subsequently aggregated at any statistical level. Several advantages of H _cto are explained: (i) connections with thermodynamics and information theory; (ii) combination of physical and statistical elements; (iii) measurements of entropy and/or information depending on the reference point, and (iv) a collection of examples based on the scientific literature that supports the application of H _cto. Simplified graphical models of the ontogeny of health condition are also shown. The empirical feasibility of using H _cto is also analysed, by concluding that it could be a tangible reality in the near future.

KEYWORDS:

• Cell
• entropy
• health indicators
• information
• interdisciplinary science
• tissue organization level
• health ontogeny
• human body microflora

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Ricardo A. Rodríguez is BSc in Biology; MSc in Didactic of Science; PhD in Ecosystem Ecology; PhD in Development Economics; 17 years of teaching experience at the university level in several disciplines. His interest is to develop reliable approaches to unify several fields of science (e.g. physics, health sciences, economics, ecology) that seem disconnected from each other at the first glance. Dr Rodríguez is the founder of organic biophysics of ecosystems (OBEC).

Rodrigo Riera holds a PhD in Marine Invertebrate Ecology, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology, Faculty of Science, Catholic University of the Holy Conception (UCSC), Chile. His interests are (i) the human perturbations on marine coastal ecosystems, and (ii) the study of global diversity of fish and invertebrates from coastal ecosystems, mainly temperate reefs.

Israel Reyes pursued a degree in Physiotherapy from the University of Laguna. Currently, he works as a physiotherapist at his own Fisionatura Center for Mayorazgo in La Orotava, on the Spanish island of Tenerife. He also has degrees of Specialist in Manual Therapy from the University of La Laguna, and Specialist in Invasive Therapies from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Juan D. Delgado (PhD) since 2008 he is an associate professor of Ecology in the Department of Physical, Chemical and Natural Systems, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain. He has also done research and teaching activity in benthic ecology and zoology, biological invasions, and effects of human impacts (mainly road systems) on ecosystems, and was previously at the Applied Physics and Ecology areas at University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.

Notes

1 An extensive indicator is a variable that depends on the system size.

2 From bacteria, plants, animals, human beings and ecosystems to the planet as a whole if we assume the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock and Margulis 1974) as true.

3 Their nested structure, like the layers of an onion (e.g. human body → systems of organs → organs → different types of tissues → cells → cellular organelles → genetic material), is other of the most typical traits of those systems in which there is a trade-off between information and entropy. This trade-off is carried out in every of the asymmetric functional interphases placed on the borders between all these hierarchical levels. For example, action potential (nerve impulse) is a typical case of trade-off between information and entropy at the level of cell membrane, because a communication signal is transmitted at the expense of energy consumption to support the active transport of cations in order to produce the depolarization and repolarization of cell membrane.

4 For example, Equation (1) = H ≈ lnW/N has been used as an indicator of the complexity or quantity of information of plant and animal collections in museums, although museum collections are not thermodynamic systems.

5 Other conventional indicators of health, as belly circumference due to the accumulation of adipose tissue, are included in the indicator we are proposing by yielding lower H values because of the reduction of evenness given the exaggerated abundance of adipocytes; see item 4, below.

6 Originally, Shannon (1948) named J’ as ‘relative entropy', which acquires values from 0 to 1, and 1−J' = R (redundancy).

7 Shannon (1948) accumulates a total of 110,536 citations hitherto (on 29 April 2019) in comparison, for instance, with only 5433 citations for the first article of Einstein (1905) about relativity theory (a proportion of 20:1 in favor of Shannon’s article).

8 This is feasible, since nowadays there are techniques to see a single molecule, or even for manipulating individual atoms. For example, despite human body cells deploy a large variation in volume (e.g. from 28.5 μm³ in a single sperm cell to 4,000,000 μm³ in an oocyte, BNID 109891, and BNID 101664, respectively) the volume of a typical mammalian tissue culture cell is 4000 μm³ (Luby-Phelps 2000).