The trouble appears, especially for biologists and other “squishy” scientists, when Nature seems to have set things up so that every law has some exceptions. I’ll leave it to you to Google on either “white crow” or “white raven” and to admire those fine and intelligent birds. So, given our objectives of maximizing one information measure and minimizing the other, how should we proceed? Do we change our law to say “99+% of crows are black?” Do we change it to say “All crows are black, not counting ravens as crows, and except for a fraction under 1% of crows which are albinos and also have pink eyes?”
We change it to say, “99+% of crows have such-and-such alleles of genes for determining feather colour; certain other alleles are rare and result in a bird lacking feather pigments due to the synthesis pathway being broken at such-and-such a step for lack of such-and-such a protein. The mutation is disadvantageous, hence the absence of any substantial population of white crows.” (Or whatever the actual story is, I’m just making that one up.) If we don’t know the actual story, then the best we can do is say that for reasons we don’t know, it happens now and then that black crows can give birth to a white offspring.
Squishiness is not a property of biological phenomena, but of our knowledge of those phenomena. Exceptions are in our descriptions, not in Nature.
We change it to say, “99+% of crows have such-and-such alleles of genes for determining feather colour; certain other alleles are rare and result in a bird lacking feather pigments due to the synthesis pathway being broken at such-and-such a step for lack of such-and-such a protein. The mutation is disadvantageous, hence the absence of any substantial population of white crows.” (Or whatever the actual story is, I’m just making that one up.) If we don’t know the actual story, then the best we can do is say that for reasons we don’t know, it happens now and then that black crows can give birth to a white offspring.
Squishiness is not a property of biological phenomena, but of our knowledge of those phenomena. Exceptions are in our descriptions, not in Nature.