4 ms·
Nature doesn't use arbitrary random sequences of base pairs, any more than we use random sequences of English letters. We can make them, of course, but that's
by auntienomen 8y ago
Nature doesn't use arbitrary random sequences of base pairs, any more than we use random sequences of English letters. We can make them, of course, but that's as meaningful as 'bthdkekd'.
I am not sure we know enough about the correlation structure of the DNA code to do the calculation you propose.
- jcims 8y agoIn a way it is arbitrary, because anything else would imply meaning or intent. Mutations are, as far as we know, arbitrary. Your last point is the thing that has stymied me to date. What is the range of mutation that would allow for a successful offspring and convey (mal)adaptive changes.
- auntienomen 8y agoI use 'arbitrary' in the sense of uniformly random. The point is it's not uniformly random. You can think of reproduction as a random walk in the space of DNA combinations, but it's not a uniform random walk. It has a structure that comes from the biochemical processes which perform the recombinations of DNA. Focusing on mutations ignores this point. (Also, as an aside, it's not settled that mutations occur at random positions. That may be a reasonable starting point, but it's likely that the way DNA folds into nucleosomes/chromatine/chromosomes biases the location of mutations.)