"One mutation, one death" is, of course, silly if taken literally - but the idea might have some utility if the purpose is to establish an upper bound on the quantity of information that selective deaths can provide.
The general principle of harmful mutations being eliminated from the population is good. But in the simulations that appear to have been run, it looks like the "mutation rate" and thus the death rate, was the rate at which a copying error makes a mistake in one DNA base pair. The actual rate you would want to use would be massively lower.
Today's post, Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound was originally published on 04 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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