Tom_McCabe2 comments on Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 November 2007 04:54PM

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Comment author: Tom_McCabe2 05 November 2007 12:20:12AM 0 points [-]

"To sum up: The mathematician's bits here are very close to bits on a hard drive, because every DNA base that matters has to be supported by "one mutation, one death" to overcome per-base copying errors."

There are only twenty amino acids plus a stop code for each codon, so the theoretical information bound is 4.4 bits/codon, not 6 bits, even for coding DNA. A common amino acid, such as leucine, only requires two base pairs to specify; the third base pair can freely mutate without any phenotypic effects at all.

"Can you provide an argument as to why none of this affects the "speed limit" (not even by a constant factor?)"

For a full explanation, see an evolutionary biology textbook. But basically, the 1 bit/generation bound is information-theoretic; it applies, not just to any species, but to *any* self-reproducing organism, even one based on RNA or silicon. The specifics of how information is utilized, in our case DNA -> mRNA -> protein, don't matter.