Information transmission in evolution

On the basis of a model previously established for the random-mutation portion of the synthetic theory of evolution, an investigation is made of the information that can be transmitted from the environment to the evolving species. The probability that a given adaptive character is produced decreases with increasing information measure of the adaptive character. The average information transmitted in any one evolutionary step is defined as the product of the information and its probability of transmission. The average information turns out to be very small for a reasonable number of trials and reasonable gene size. This is consistent with the conjecture that evolution proceeds in small steps, and the size of a step can be discussed quantitatively in terms of the amount of adaptive information that is being transmitted into the species.