Events

KLI Colloquia are invited research talks of about an hour followed by 30 min discussion. The talks are held in English, open to the public, and offered in hybrid format. 

 

Fall-Winter 2025-2026 KLI Colloquium Series

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5881861923?omn=85945744831
Meeting ID: 588 186 1923

 

25 Sept 2025 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

A Dynamic Canvas Model of Butterfly and Moth Color Patterns

Richard Gawne (Nevada State Museum)

 

14 Oct 2025 (Tues) 3-4:30 PM CET

Vienna, the Laboratory of Modernity

Richard Cockett (The Economist)

 

23 Oct 2025 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

How Darwinian is Darwinian Enough? The Case of Evolution and the Origins of Life

Ludo Schoenmakers (KLI)

 

6 Nov (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

Common Knowledge Considered as Cause and Effect of Behavioral Modernity

Ronald Planer (University of Wollongong)

 

20 Nov (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

Rates of Evolution, Time Scaling, and the Decoupling of Micro- and Macroevolution

Thomas Hansen (University of Oslo)

 

4 Dec (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

Chance, Necessity, and the Evolution of Evolvability

Cristina Villegas (KLI)

 

8 Jan 2026 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

Embodied Rationality: Normative and Evolutionary Foundations

Enrico Petracca (KLI)

 

15 Jan 2026 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

On Experimental Models of Developmental Plasticity and Evolutionary Novelty

Patricia Beldade (Lisbon University)

 

29 Jan 2026 (Thurs) 3-4:30 PM CET

O Theory Where Art Thou? The Changing Role of Theory in Theoretical Biology in the 20th Century and Beyond

Jan Baedke (Ruhr University Bochum)

Event Details

Omri Tal
KLI Colloquia
Assessing the Information Inherent in Population Structure
Omri TAL (Max-Planck Institute, Leipzig)
2015-02-13 17:15 - 2015-02-13 17:15
KLI
Organized by KLI

Topic description:
Population structure is a core concept in population genetics, capturing the substructure inherent in a collection of genotypes, sampled from diverse locations. Given data from multiple loci, measures of informativeness aim to quantify the potential for accurate ancestry inference, or alternatively, extract a 'population signal' and provide some sense of data 'clusteredness'. Motivated by Claude Shannon’s axiomatic approach in deriving a measure of information in communication systems based on entropy, I first identify a set of intuitively justifiable criteria that any such quantitative information measure should satisfy, where the notion of communication noise can be made analogous to sampling noise. I show that standard information-theoretic measures such as mutual information or relative entropy cannot satisfactorily account for this sense of information, especially when knowledge on population size is considered, necessitating borrowing notions from statistical-learning.

 

Biographical note:
Omri Tal is currently a research associate (postdoc) at Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig and was previously a postdoc at CPNSS, London School of Economics (LSE). He received his PhD in 2012 from Tel Aviv University, School of Philosophy and The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, under the supervision of Prof. Eva Jablonka ("Heritability, variation and classification: towards a new formalization of biological concepts"). In his research he takes a quantitative approach in the interpretation of central biological concepts. Using formal tools from probability, statistical learning and information theory, and conceptual analysis, he aims to produce novel formulations that may enable a deeper appreciation, and also assist in the application, of otherwise technical concepts. He has worked on heritability and epigenetic information, and is currently focusing on capturing the notion of 'population structure' from an information-theoretic perspective. http://omrital.altervista.org/