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Unforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. For example, if we engineered a microbe to

Unforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. For example, if we engineered a microbe to use AUCG instead of ATCG for DNA, which would require massive changes to its cellular machinery, even a generation a minute for a million years would not be enough to switch back to regular base pairs because the microbe would be incapable of basic horizontal gene transfer with other microbes or giant evolutionary leaps that require precise simultaneous changes to all of its reproductive machinery. Obviously this is not 100% guaranteed but if we can engineer an organism that fundamentally depends on a metabolic process that is prohibitively difficult to evolve naturally, we can maintain an extreme level of control.

JadeNB 10y ago
> Unforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. Oh, I see. I incorrectly read the emphasis of your post as being the unlikelihood of change occurring "in a few generations", rather than on the fundamental nature of the changes.
Retric 10y ago
Not really, evolution has a very low probability of making large scale changes. However it can operate in any direction giving many many options for getting from A to B. Many single celled organisms can for example swap small segments of code between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer Thus the minimum change required for some information exchange is only transcription not survival and thus fairly simple. Sure, the original organism died, but as long as some information carries on that's what evolution is about. A larger barrier is the value of such transcription being limited until it works. But again if there happens to be a simple way to do it then it might show up.

JadeNB 10y ago

> Unforeseen, sure, but evolution is practically incapable of wholesale changes to an organism at a fundamental level. Oh, I see. I incorrectly read the emphasis of your post as being the unlikelihood of change occurring "in a few generations", rather than on the fundamental nature of the changes.

Retric 10y ago

Not really, evolution has a very low probability of making large scale changes. However it can operate in any direction giving many many options for getting from A to B. Many single celled organisms can for example swap small segments of code between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer Thus the minimum change required for some information exchange is only transcription not survival and thus fairly simple. Sure, the original organism died, but as long as some information carries on that's what evolution is about. A larger barrier is the value of such transcription being limited until it works. But again if there happens to be a simple way to do it then it might show up.