# Ignorance can be evolutionarily beneficial

## TL;DR

This paper explores how accounting for the costs of information collection can lead to situations where ignorance is evolutionarily advantageous, challenging the assumption that more information always benefits organisms.

## Contribution

It introduces a model that incorporates costs of information gathering, showing conditions where ignorance can have a positive reproductive value, and links this to empirical observations.

## Key findings

- Information collection costs can make ignorance beneficial.
- Conditions identified where reproductive value of information is negative.
- Provides an alternative explanation for sleep evolution and Bayesian behavior breakdown.

## Abstract

Information is increasingly being viewed as a resource used by organisms to increase their fitness. Indeed, it has been formally shown that there is a sensible way to assign a reproductive value to information and it is non-negative. However, all of this work assumed that information collection is cost-free. Here, we account for such a cost and provide conditions for when the reproductive value of information will be negative. In these instances, counter-intuitively, it is in the interest of the organism to remain ignorant. We link our results to empirical studies where Bayesian behaviour appears to break down in complex environments and provide an alternative explanation of lowered arousal thresholds in the evolution of sleep.