You could think of the ‘advice’ given by evolution being in the form of a short program, e.g. for a neural-net-like learning algorithm. In this case, a relatively short string of advice could result in a lot of apparent optimization.
(For the book example: imagine a species that outputs books of 20Gb containing only the letter ‘a’. This is very unlikely to be produced by random choice, yet it can be specified with only a few bits of ‘advice’)
You could think of the ‘advice’ given by evolution being in the form of a short program, e.g. for a neural-net-like learning algorithm. In this case, a relatively short string of advice could result in a lot of apparent optimization.
(For the book example: imagine a species that outputs books of 20Gb containing only the letter ‘a’. This is very unlikely to be produced by random choice, yet it can be specified with only a few bits of ‘advice’)