ITBio Books

I maintain a “bookshelf” of books related to the overlap of the topics of information theory and molecular biology at Goodreads.com. It comprises both broad popular science titles as well as dense mathematical and scientific texts.  Some representative texts appear below, or visit the entire list using the link above.

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For journal articles and academic papers, please see the Information Theory and Biology References page.

Information Theory and Biology Books

Entropy Demystified: The Second Law Reduced to Plain Common Sense
Such a lovely and straightforward little text. Truly elegant.
The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life
Though there is a paucity of equations, particularly on the information theoretic side, Loewenstein does a fantastic job of discussing the theory and philosophy of what is going on in the overlapping fields of information theory and micr…
Information Theory and Evolution
This is a fantastic book which, for the majority of people, I’d give a five star review. For my own purposes, however, I was expecting far more on the theoretical side of information theory and statistical mechanics as applied to microb…
Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical
This book combining biology, microbiology, mathematics, evolution and even information theory is directly in my wheelhouse. I had delayed reading it following a few initial poor reviews, and sadly I must confirm that I’m ultimately disa…
Complexity: A Guided Tour
This is handily one of the best, most interesting, and (to me at least) the most useful popularly written science books I’ve yet to come across. Most popular science books usually bore me to tears and end up being only pedantic for their…




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