Information value and information content in the evolutionary strategy of the genetic code

Summary In previous papers we defined the information value of a genetic code as a measure of its efficiency in the utilization of the information stored in the DNA molecule. Here the genetic codes which have been proposed to be intermediate steps in evolution are analysed in terms of information theory. The results show that evolution follows an optimization strategy between increasing the information content and decreasing the information value,i.e. in each evolutionary step the average information value per unitary information content decreases and at the same time the probability of nonsense mutations goes down as the code evolves. To speed up publication, the authors of this paper have agreed to not recive the proofs for correction.