Interesting...I think I vaguely understand what you’re talking about, but I’m doubtful that these concepts really apply to biology. Especially since your example is about constraints on evolvability rather than functioning. In practice that is pretty much how everything tends to work, with absolutely wild amounts of pleiotropy and epistasis, but that’s not a problem unless you want to evolve a new function. Which is probably why the strong strong evolutionary default is towards stasis, not change.
I guess my priors are pretty different because my background is in virology, where our expectation (after decades of painful lessons) is that the default is for proteins to be wildly multifunctional, with many many many “design degrees of freedom.” Granted viruses are a bit of a special case, but I do think they can provide a helpful stress test/simpler model for information theoretic models of genome function.
Interesting...I think I vaguely understand what you’re talking about, but I’m doubtful that these concepts really apply to biology. Especially since your example is about constraints on evolvability rather than functioning. In practice that is pretty much how everything tends to work, with absolutely wild amounts of pleiotropy and epistasis, but that’s not a problem unless you want to evolve a new function. Which is probably why the strong strong evolutionary default is towards stasis, not change.
I guess my priors are pretty different because my background is in virology, where our expectation (after decades of painful lessons) is that the default is for proteins to be wildly multifunctional, with many many many “design degrees of freedom.” Granted viruses are a bit of a special case, but I do think they can provide a helpful stress test/simpler model for information theoretic models of genome function.