ABSTRACT
Biological information presupposes the origin of life. Once life has originated, evolution can take existing biological information and augment it. Consequently, if evolution is indeed responsible for large-scale biological transformations, such as from “monad to man,”1 it must have the ability to generate huge increases in the information content of living forms. There is, after all, a lot more genetic information in a human being than in a bacterium.2 So how does evolution do it? How, as Richard Dawkins puts it, does “the information content of genomes increase in evolution”?3 The conventional understanding of what causes biological information to increase over natural history is thoroughly Darwinian. In a word, natural selection is seen by the evolutionary community as the driving force for the elaboration of biological information once life has originated. Thus, according to Dawkins,
In every generation, natural selection removes the less successful genes from the gene pool, so the remaining gene pool is a narrower subset. The narrowing is
1 The phrase “monad to man” is Herbert Spencer’s. Although Spencer meant by it to connect evolution to the idea of progress, the phrase underscores the vast transformation that organisms are supposed to have undergone over natural history, evolving from relatively simple single-celled beginnings to far more complex multicelled organisms that can reason, talk, and self-consciously reflect on what they are doing. See Michael Ruse, Monad to Man: e Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 188.
