> And while the translation of the genome into a brain is not straightforward, the brain cannot have more design information than the genome.
We know this is mostly true, but not entirely true. While the genome is probably the biggest repository of information driving brain development, there is no hard and fast law saying it's the only one. It's easy to see how a bit of information external to the genome, like "maternal alcohol consumption and lead ingestion are bad," can effect brain development.
And besides that, the information content of a design is not related to the number of unique structures the design describes. By analogy, the output of `print i for i in [0...100000]` contains 100000 unique lines, but the information content is bounded by the program that generated it.
Oddly enough, Kurzweil actually misquoted Allen there, and his refutation does apply quite well to Allen's original statement, which was that each neural structure has been individually refined by evolution. Evolution does, in fact, operate solely on the genome (plus or minus some epigenetic factors here and there), and it really is impossible for it to tune that many structures individually.
We know this is mostly true, but not entirely true. While the genome is probably the biggest repository of information driving brain development, there is no hard and fast law saying it's the only one. It's easy to see how a bit of information external to the genome, like "maternal alcohol consumption and lead ingestion are bad," can effect brain development.