Is "Hello World" in C just the one .c file, or do we have to count the standard libraries? How about the hardware designs of the PC running it? If you look at just the .c file, it's a few lines, if you look at everything that's actually required to run it, that's a bit more complicated.
And yet nobody would ever claim that the fundamental minimum complexity of the "Hello, world!" algorithm was more than a few lines of text, because the "important stuff" in that algorithm has nothing to do with all of the irrelevant complexity in the operating system and hardware, all of which could be done in millions of different ways without changing the fundamental algorithmic insights that "Hello, World!" requires.
Yes, there are epigenetic factors that get passed along, but their effects tend to be transient, lost over a few generations at most, adding maybe a handful of tunable bits of information to the genome that can be quick-flipped as the environment demands. I don't know that anyone has ever suggested that any non-trivial amount of data is actually passed millions of generations down the line through this mechanism (keep in mind, to seriously take issue [i.e. beyond a mere factor of 2] with the estimates that you disagree with, you'd need to find more than 25 megabytes of evolutionarily-accessible data that lives somewhere other than DNA), and I'd be extremely interested to know if that was the case. Every evolutionary biologist I know focuses almost exclusively on genetic code as the evolutionary substrate because it's the only available channel that seems reliable enough for information to flow through unmolested over millions of years.
And yet nobody would ever claim that the fundamental minimum complexity of the "Hello, world!" algorithm was more than a few lines of text, because the "important stuff" in that algorithm has nothing to do with all of the irrelevant complexity in the operating system and hardware, all of which could be done in millions of different ways without changing the fundamental algorithmic insights that "Hello, World!" requires.
Yes, there are epigenetic factors that get passed along, but their effects tend to be transient, lost over a few generations at most, adding maybe a handful of tunable bits of information to the genome that can be quick-flipped as the environment demands. I don't know that anyone has ever suggested that any non-trivial amount of data is actually passed millions of generations down the line through this mechanism (keep in mind, to seriously take issue [i.e. beyond a mere factor of 2] with the estimates that you disagree with, you'd need to find more than 25 megabytes of evolutionarily-accessible data that lives somewhere other than DNA), and I'd be extremely interested to know if that was the case. Every evolutionary biologist I know focuses almost exclusively on genetic code as the evolutionary substrate because it's the only available channel that seems reliable enough for information to flow through unmolested over millions of years.