[SEQ RERUN] Natural Selection’s Speed Limit and Complexity Bound

Today’s post, Natural Selection’s Speed Limit and Complexity Bound was originally published on 04 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

Tried to argue mathematically that there could be at most 25MB of meaningful information (or thereabouts) in the human genome, but computer simulations failed to bear out the mathematical argument. It does seem probably that evolution has some kind of speed limit and complexity bound—eminent evolutionary biologists seem to believe it, and in fact the Genome Project discovered only 25,000 genes in the human genome—but this particular math may not be the correct argument.


Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyways), and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.