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> There's less than 80 minutes worth of music's worth of information

Or awful lot of text information (state of art compressors can do up to 1:10 ratio for plain text, decoder itself is rather small, 750MB compressed could potentially contain like 7GB of text data).

Also, look at demoscene. 4k (4 kB is the size of executable) can do crazy things, and 64kB can fit a lot of nice 3D objects, music, text, complex effects etc. weight less than any screenshot of any moment of running demo. In 95kB you can have full game (google kkringer)

P.S. better example: full snake game in 56 BYTES https://github.com/donno2048/snake

For comparation the link above is 34 bytes, whole sentence is 83 bytes. It's possible to do a lot if we're talking about code

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> Also, look at demoscene. 4k (4 kB is the size of executable) can do crazy things

There are limits to how Kolmogorov complexity scales up. Many of these tricks are exploiting procedural techniques that can be expressed in minimal terms. Once you start feeding in actual information that is not feasible to express procedurally (i.e., is already compressed/high-entropy), you are forced to accumulate bits. An obvious example of this would be incorporating a texture that is multiple megabytes when compressed as a jpeg on disk.

Evolution also uses dirty tricks all the time, for no reason. E.g. the same region gets reused for totally unrelated use-cases.

> An obvious example of this would be incorporating a texture

Some random range of storage data is now the texture. It was used to process formatting logic but now also a texture

There's an interesting implication to this. We assume that evolution happens when random mutations (similar to random bit flips, removal or injection?) occur and when the random result has an advantage, the mutation tends to remain in the gene pool.

Yet at the same time the result of this random code is extremely compressed, to the point we compare it to procedural generative code.

Not sure what we can do with this but it certainly seems like we can once again get inspired by nature on this one.

I'd argue you could even take that one step further. Limiting it to the data encoded by DNA does not take into account what it is interacting with. DNA interacts with an ocean of protein leading to untold numbers of interactions. The DNA could just be the operating system in all this calling upon RNA and other "devices" to execute functions.

To expand upon your compression idea, the index it is using exists outside the DNA encoding itself which means it could be holding an absolute ton of data.

Bonus: https://xkcd.com/3056/

Indeed. Chances are that the DNA itself is but one part of the puzzle. The protein soup the DNA interacts with is partially random and partially a consequence of the DNA itself and that interplay is likely a complexity space several orders of magnitude bigger than the DNA itself

> The DNA could just be the operating system...

I am fond of the analogy of DNA to procedural generation. The "operating system", as I see it, is physics. Everything else is primitives built on top of that.

Our brains can't begin to comprehend the untold multitudes of interactions occurring at a molecular scale over geologic time.

Saying that the information doesn't come from the DNA, but from the environment--well that is just conceding my point. Sure, environment is way, way, more important to the formation of who you are than genetics is.

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