Scott, the mechanisms you’ve described indeed allow us to end up with more meaningful physical DNA than the amount of information in it. To give a concrete example, a protein-coding gene is copied, then mutates, and then there’s two highly structured proteins performing different chemical functions, which because of their similarity, evolved faster than counting the bases separately would seem to allow.
So the 1 bit/generation speed limit on evolution is not a speed limit on altered DNA bases—definitely not!
The problem is that these meaningful bases also have 10^-8 copying errors per base per generation, so the above does not bypass the total complexity bound on evolution. The total complexity bound on evolution is not some hyper-compressed Kolmogorov algorithmic complexity, it’s counting meaningful bases (bases such that if they are changed they degrade the fitness of the organism).
So: Mammalian evolutions can create 1 bit of algorithmic complexity per generation, possibly highly compressed; but the total number of meaningful DNA bases is limited to 100,000,000 bases or less, without compression in the reproductively transmitted genetic material, but potentially with all kinds of unpacking over the lifetime of a particular organism.
Scott, the mechanisms you’ve described indeed allow us to end up with more meaningful physical DNA than the amount of information in it. To give a concrete example, a protein-coding gene is copied, then mutates, and then there’s two highly structured proteins performing different chemical functions, which because of their similarity, evolved faster than counting the bases separately would seem to allow.
So the 1 bit/generation speed limit on evolution is not a speed limit on altered DNA bases—definitely not!
The problem is that these meaningful bases also have 10^-8 copying errors per base per generation, so the above does not bypass the total complexity bound on evolution. The total complexity bound on evolution is not some hyper-compressed Kolmogorov algorithmic complexity, it’s counting meaningful bases (bases such that if they are changed they degrade the fitness of the organism).
So: Mammalian evolutions can create 1 bit of algorithmic complexity per generation, possibly highly compressed; but the total number of meaningful DNA bases is limited to 100,000,000 bases or less, without compression in the reproductively transmitted genetic material, but potentially with all kinds of unpacking over the lifetime of a particular organism.