My immediate and unbaked reaction to this is that it is the first
quantification I have seen for the "nature-nurture" or "genetic-environmental"
split, since I would tend to agree with Glenn's choice 2. "The information
comes from external to the individual (experiences) as Deacon suggests." In
other words, the environment gives the brain over 100,000 times as much
information as genetics does. Of course, much of this information might not
have too much significance, such as the memory of what you first saw when you
woke up on your 1735th day out of the womb, but on the other hand presumably
one's personal relationship to God would depend much more heavily on this
information than on one's genetics, or else Christians might as well stop
evangelism and just concentrate on having more babies.
On slightly second thought, my half-baked reaction is that maybe not
all of the petabits of the neuronal connection information are allowed by the
genetics, so that much of this information is compressible. Then a larger
fraction could be due to the genes.
A few months ago I saw a newspaper article proposing that humans be
implanted with chips that would store their lifetime experiences, and I have a
vague memory that this would supposedly require the storage of 10^16 bits, a
bit beyond present chip capabilities. (I don't have such a chip installed for
me to check the number.) If so, and if the brain can store 10^15 bits, it
could in principle remember (have stored, not necessarily be able to recall)
about 10% of one's experience. Of course, I suspect that the efficiency is not
near 100%, so the fraction stored might be much less than 10%. Does anyone
else remember the estimated storage requirements of this memory chip? (If one
had several of these devices installed as backups, but if they all were
inoperative one day, one might say that "the chips are down.")
Don Page