That "fundamentally bad concept" is unfortunately a popular one with creationists: they claim that mutations always destroy "information" and never create it, o

That "fundamentally bad concept" is unfortunately a popular one with creationists: they claim that mutations always destroy "information" and never create it, or that there's a "law of conservation of information" that says information can't ever be created other than by intelligent agents -- and they are always curiously reluctant to say exactly what they mean by "information". Norvig's little experiment shows (crudely and unreliably, to be sure) that, with the usual mathematical definition of "information", mutations typically increase information. Of course this is old news, and won't be any use in dealing with creationists because they aren't using the usual mathematical definition of "information" in the first place. Or any particular definition, for that matter. With that definition, there's nothing at all wrong with the fact that a string of 2N random bits contains more "information" than the human genome with N base-pairs. There's redundancy and repetitive (so far as we can tell) junk in the human genome, and that reduces the amount of "information" it contains. A maximally concise version of any substantial body of text, or genome, or software, or whatever, "looks" random almost everywhere according to almost any simple test; because if it didn't, we could use the fact to compress it further. This being HN, I'll add that this is one reason why I am skeptical of Paul Graham's claim that "conciseness is power" in programming languages; a really maximally concise language would also be maximally incomprehensible.