Rolf_Nelson2 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: Rolf_Nelson2 06 November 2007 04:59:00AM 0 points [-]

If you look at equation 3 of MacKay's paper, you'll see that he defines information in terms of frequency of an allele in a population

I apologize, my statement was ambiguous. The topic of Eliezer's post is how much information is in an individual organism's genome, since that's what limits the complexity of a single organism, which is what I'm talking about.

Equation 3 addresses the holistic information of the species, which I find irrelevant to the topic at hand. Maybe Alice, Bob, and Charlie's DNA could together have up to 75 MB of data in some holographic sense. Maybe a dog, cat, mouse, and anteater form a complex 100 MB system, but I don't care.

Would you agree that the *information-theoretic* increase in the amount of *adaptive* data in a *single organism* is still limited by O(1) bits in Mackay's model? If not, please let me know, because in that case I'm clearly missing something and would like to learn from my mistake.