In this paper, we obtain a quantitative estimate of unique continuation and an observability inequality from an equidistributed set for solutions of the diffusion equation in the whole space RN. This kind of observability indicates that the total energy of solutions can be controlled by the energy localized in a measurable subset, which is equidistributed over the whole space. The proof of our results is based on an interesting reduction method [18, 22], as well as the propagation of smallness for the gradient of solutions to elliptic equations [24].