If you take a population of organisms, and you divide it arbitrarily into 2 groups, and you show the 2 groups to God and ask, “Which one of these groups is, on average, more fit?”, and God tells you, then you have been given 1 bit of information.
But if you take a population of organisms, and ask God to divide it into 2 groups, one consisting of organisms of above-average fitness, and one consisting of organisms of below-average fitness, that gives you a lot more than 1 bit. It takes n lg(n) bits to sort the population; then you subtract out the information needed to sort each half, so you gain n lg(n) − 2(n/2)lg(n/2) = n[lg(n) - lg(n/2)]
= nlg(2) = n bits.
If you do tournament selection, you have n/2 tournaments, each of which gives you 1 bit, so you get n/2 bits per generation.
EO Wilson has a section in his autobiography, /Naturalist/, on what Gould and Lewontin did after the publication of Wilson’s /Sociobiology/. They formed a study group, which met every week to criticize Sociobiology, then after a few months, published their results.
The kicker is that they held their meetings about a 30-second walk from Wilson’s office in Harvard—but never told him about them.
This proves to me that science and truth never were their primary concern.