The seminar will describe a (hopefully novel) rigorous definition of adaptive capacity in terms of the maximal possible number of distinct varieties of organism that can be reliably produced in an evolutionary system. This number can be approximately calculated for various genetic systems, and its dependence on genome size, mutation rate, and method of encoding will be explored.
An unexpected and quite strong conclusion is that, in principle, information can be stored most efficiently in genomes the more diffusely it is represented. This finding suggests that some genetic information may be stored in ways that are undetectable by current biological sequence comparison methods.