Adirian 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: Adirian 06 November 2007 04:30:00AM 0 points [-]

First, there is the correct point that our mutation rate has been at a steady decline - the first couple of billion years had a much higher rate of data encoding than the last couple of billion years, of which, the former had a much higher.

Second, there is the point that a significant portion of pregnancies are failures - we could possibly double the rate of data encoding from that alone, presuming all of one of those bits is improvement on genetic repair and similar functionality. (Reducing mutation rates of critical genes.)

Third, multiple populations could encode multiple bits of data, if they are kept distinct except for a very small level of cross-breeding to keep both populations compliant. (That is, a low level of geographic isolation could, in sexually reproducing creatures, increase the number of gene pools to play with, although at a nonlinear rate - it wouldn't be a huge increase over a bit per half of population lost.)

Fourth, and finally, not only did you forget the first two billion years of evolution, you forgot DNA transfusion in its varying forms - which occurs occasionally in bacteria, whereby one can acquire the information encoded in another.