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Dear Frank,
I did not define information in the essay or any of the other words used though I did offer a very brief explanation of the word "phenotype" in brackets, as I was aware that the essay would be read by non biologists who might be unfamiliar with the term. I have tried in the essay this year to keep the language simple and the sentences short and not overly complicated.
I have written word lists giving the definition of words, as I use them, with the framework to overcome problems of misunderstanding. The rules did not permit supplementary pages of written definitions, which I might otherwise have included. "Information" has not been on the word lists I produced prior to this essay competition. As I deliberately did not use it. I have, in my numerous blog comments over the last couple of years, avoided the term "information" because it does have certain meanings to physicists that I have not necessarily intended by its use. In this essay it is meant in a very broad sense.
Structures and patterns are destroyed and so anything "contained" that might generate data, or that might have been later learned from such data -ie. inform is lost from the Object universe. Structures includes neural structures permitting memory of events or facts. EM and other sensory data can persist in the environment after the source objects have ceased to exist but it is a "data pool" and not the space-time continuum past, present and future from Bang to Crunch (or whatever) in which everything is conserved. That is what was meant.