Mike_Johnson 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: Mike_Johnson 05 November 2007 05:46:21AM 0 points [-]

A mammalian gene pool can acquire at most 1 bit of information per generation.

Eliezer,

That's a very provocative, interestingly empirical, yet troublingly ambiguous statement. :)

I think it's important to note that evolution is very effective (within certain constraints) in figuring out ways to optimize not only genes but also genomes-- it seems probable that a large amount of said "bits" have been on the level of structural or mechanical optimizations.

These structural/mechanical optimizations might in turn involve mechanisms by which to use existing non-coding, "junk" DNA in various ways (which might, in some sense, effectively increase the "bit size" of a single adaption into the megabytes).

It may be telling that we haven't seen, in three billion years and given all the other genetic complexity out there, any organisms evolve a mechanism to clean the junk out of its DNA.

At any rate, I think your argument is interesting, and the topic is simply fascinating, but I take your numbers with a grain of salt. No offense.