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Thank you so much for the heads up!

Wolfram repeats that random initial conditions lead to ordered end results.

That is where I crash and burn by running headlong into Kolmogorov and Chaitin, randomness and complexity. How do you reconcile it?

That is where I crash and burn by running headlong into Kolmogorov and Chaitin, randomness and complexity. How do you reconcile it?

There must be a lot of material out there written about information in biology that I haven't read. One thing I can say is that information in biology, normally thought of as contained in the DNA sequence, is far from absolute. DNA can be thought of as carrying information about it's environment and when that environment changes, a sequence of DNA has as little information as any random piece would. For example, a virus is quite active in the environment of its host but completely inactive or dead outside of it. How is it possible to make definitive statements about the information contained in a particular sequence of DNA? I don't think the field of information theory has progressed far enough in relation to biology.

Random objects may be highly structured, in fact more so than non-random ones. There's no contradiction between Chaitin and Wolfram here. The whole field of "self-orgainzed complexity" is devoted to the emergence of complex structures from "random" causes. Highly structured means lots of information means high complexity. It takes lots of information to describe (for example) a random scattering of airplane parts, but the assembly manual (from Boeing?) describes an assembled plane easily.

We must be careful not to confuse complexity with usefulness. For example, the probabilty of getting a poker hand consisting of the Heart Ace, King, Queen, Jack , and Ten is equal to the probability of getting the Spade Two, Heart Jack, Diamond Six, Club Five, and Club Trey. The second hand is "worth" less in poker, not because of its probability, but because of the classes we assign hands to. We may treat all groups of scattered airplane parts as equivalent (not assembled into a plane) even though each group differes from the others by as much as they do from the working plane.