Erik3 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: Erik3 06 November 2007 12:01:00PM 0 points [-]

Wiseman: "It's not junk DNA, it merely has usefulness in many different configurations."

Perhaps it was unfortunate to use the term junk DNA. What I was thinking of was more on the lines of information content. If a given base is useful in several configurations, it contains that much less information.

If base X has to be e.g. guanine to have its effect, that is one out of four possible states, i.e. 2 bits of information. If it could be either guanine or thymine, then it only contains one bit.

It may be that the actual human genome uses more than 5*10^7 bases to encode 10^8 bits of information. The total information would still have to fit in 25 MB after you got rid of redundancy because of the limitations in the information upholding abilities of evolution. (Assuming the rest of Eliezers calculations.)