“Wei Dai, being able to send 10 bits each with a 60% probability of being correct, is not the same as being able to transmit 6 bits of mathematical information. It would be if you knew which 6 bits would be correct, but you don’t.”
“Given sexuality and chromosome assortment but no recombination, a species with 100 chromosomes can evolve much faster than an asexual bacterial population!”
No, it can’t. Suppose that you want to maintain the genome against a mutation pressure of one hundred bits per generation (one base flip/chromosome, to make it simple). Each member of the population, on average, will still have fifty good chromosomes. But you have to select on the individual level, and you can’t let only those organisms with no bad chromosomes reproduce: the chances of such an organism existing are astronomical. You would have to stop, say, anyone with more than forty bad chromosomes from reproducing, so maybe the next generation you’d have an average of 37 or so. But then you add fifty more the next generation… the species will quickly die out, because you can’t remove them as fast as they’re being introduced.
“Each individual chromosome can be selected, mostly independently of the others.”
All the chromosomes are packaged together in a single individual. Reproduction occurs at the individual level; you can’t reproduce some chromosomes and not others.
“Wei Dai, being able to send 10 bits each with a 60% probability of being correct, is not the same as being able to transmit 6 bits of mathematical information. It would be if you knew which 6 bits would be correct, but you don’t.”
“Given sexuality and chromosome assortment but no recombination, a species with 100 chromosomes can evolve much faster than an asexual bacterial population!”
No, it can’t. Suppose that you want to maintain the genome against a mutation pressure of one hundred bits per generation (one base flip/chromosome, to make it simple). Each member of the population, on average, will still have fifty good chromosomes. But you have to select on the individual level, and you can’t let only those organisms with no bad chromosomes reproduce: the chances of such an organism existing are astronomical. You would have to stop, say, anyone with more than forty bad chromosomes from reproducing, so maybe the next generation you’d have an average of 37 or so. But then you add fifty more the next generation… the species will quickly die out, because you can’t remove them as fast as they’re being introduced.
“Each individual chromosome can be selected, mostly independently of the others.”
All the chromosomes are packaged together in a single individual. Reproduction occurs at the individual level; you can’t reproduce some chromosomes and not others.