Evolution

Evolution is the process of life to better copy itself.

Through decades of work by legions of scientists, we now know that the process of evolution tends to lead to an increase in the information coded in Gemmule. That this must happen on average is not difficult to see. Imagine I start out with a genome encoding n bits of information. In an evolutionary process, mutations occur on the many representatives of this information in a population. The mutations can change the amount of information, or they can leave the information unchanged. If the information changes, it can increase or decrease. But very different fates befall those two different changes. The mutation that caused a decrease in information will generally lead to lower fitness, as the information stored in our gemmules is used to build the organism and reproduce. If you know less than your competitors about how to do this, you are unlikely to thrive as well as they do. If, on the other hand, you mutate towards more information—meaning better prediction—you are likely to use that information to have an edge in reproduction. So, in the long run, more information is preferred to less information, and the amount of information in our gemmules will tend to increase over time.