Fractal compression of images seems to work really well do to the fact that the world seems to have large amounts of fractal content. Perhaps do to Jeff W's energy dissipation issue. Maybe that should be looked at more as an energy transformation issue since that is also perhaps how life works...as energy extractors on the flow of energy.
The brain and before that the DNA genome may have evolved to help optimize the extraction of energy by finding auto-correlated events in the world and using them to further optimize the collection of energy.
Humans, it seems, have managed to perfect this systems. Or perhaps I should say that the super structures/life forms formed from/by humans have found a way to extract phenomenal amounts of energy. The problem with these super structures in their current state is that they don't optimize over the long run, but rather look at the short run.
Is this a problem?
If as Dawkins asserts the goal of DNA is to replicate itself, then there is a weird situation here because clearly humans are no longer evolving but rather the super structures / life forms are. This means that something IN ADDITION to the DNA itself is causing evolution. So, then what principle can guide both the evolution of DNA and the other structures created by humans? Perhaps the goal is to CREATE information. This would be something like looking at the universe as a self-extracting art archive. And historically this process has been driven by the correlation between energy extraction and creation of information.
As the brains of this art archive, perhaps it is our "purpose" to help it self-extract, and to allow it do reach "maximum" extraction, meaning most information created. As such it should be our goal to optimize our "extractive" enterprises not to maximize energy extraction over the short run but to optimize information create over the long run.