"Information Cannot Increase." Is this True?

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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 generate 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 I link to, 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 is no mystery. It is generated by a dumb process of trial and error. What works and what doesn't. It's the selection of undirected heritable variations, the core of evolution, 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 accept that evolution works in this way, will say, "Aha! But the solution is present all along!(See https://barryhisblog.blogspot.com/2025/01/no-evo-challenge-from-dembski.html)

This is true, but the information about WHAT the solution is, is not present before the algorithm runs, 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."

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