Eliezer_Yudkowsky 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: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 November 2007 04:38:44PM 0 points [-]

Fly: Imagine that having a working copy of gene "E" is essential. Now suppose a mutation creates a broken gene "Ex". Animals that are heterozygous with "E" and "Ex" are fine and pass on their genes. Only homozygous "Ex" "Ex" result in a "death" that removes 2 mutations.

Now imagine that a duplication event gives four copies of "E". In this example an animal would only need one working gene out of the four possible copies. When the rare "Ex" "Ex" "Ex" "Ex" combination arises then the resulting "death" removes four mutations.

Fly, you've just postulated four copies of the same gene, so that one death will remove four mutations. But these four copies will suffer mutations four times as often. Unless I'm missing something, this doesn't increase the bound on how much non-redundant information can be supported by one death. :)

McCabe: The factor due to redundant coding sequences is 1.36 (1.4 bits/base instead of 2.0). This *does* increase the amount of storable information, because it makes the degenerative pressure (mutation) work less efficiently. Then again, it's only a factor of 35%, so the conclusion is still basically the same.

This increases the potential number of semi-meaningful bases (bases such that some mutations have no effect but other mutations have detrimental effect) but cancels out the ability to store any increased information in such bases.