[gwern]

> What we are looking for is a relative measure of the complexity between each genome. The upper bound will not necessarily give us this relative measure because it may not be able to compress the genetic code of organisms by the same factor. The compressibility of a particular genome, by a specific algorithm will be dependent on the method of encoding of information used by the organism. For instance the organism may repeat codes for redundancy, but it may permute the letters of the copy in a predictable way, for it's own reasons. The compression algorithm used will not pick up on this.

It may or may not. But an upper bound is still an upper bound, and turns out to be usable for many purposes.