"Information Cannot Increase." Is this True?

https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/2025/09/information-cannot-increase-is-this-true.html

 

It is a common claim of people who try to falsify evolution that information cannot increase in a genome by evolutionary means. The claim is never supported by either evidence or reason, and there are several answers to it, but I want to concentrate here on just one of them.

Computer simulations implementing evolutionary genetic algorithms prove that these algorithms can and do increase information.

Some may bleat that it takes intelligence to create a computer simulation, but that is merely an attempt to avoid the point rather than to answer it.

In the simulation linked to above, the task is to find the most efficient path to visit all the points depicted. This information is not present at the start of the simulation, but it is present by the end. Nobody puts this information into the simulation, so where has it come from? It has emerged as a result of a dumb process, the selection of undirected heritable variations, a process that Huxley, Darwin's friend, when he first learned about it, declared, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!"

Some, like Dembski, who accepts that evolution works this way, will say, "Aha! But the solution is present all along!" This is true, but the information about what it is, is not, and this is the whole point.

I have picked a simple example, but genetic algorithms find solutions to problems far more complicated than this, and they can far out-perform human intelligence. In the words of Leslie Orgel, "Evolution is cleverer than you are."