4 ms·
I would imagine there's a fundamental limitation in DNAs ability to be copied over and over without information loss.
by jhedwards 7y ago
I would imagine there's a fundamental limitation in DNAs ability to be copied over and over without information loss.
- SolarNet 7y agoSure, but we can correct for that, we have the ability to reliably store copies of the information in DNA (a person's full genome is only a few gigabytes) with error correction (or at least verification).
- thfuran 7y agoOur cells are mostly diploid. But some organisms have many more copies of each chromosome - strawberries have eight. With that kind of redundancy, it should be vanishingly unlikely for a random error in DNA replication to make it into a majority of copies and any systematic error severe enough to cause it probably messes up the cell enough for it to be culled by other mechanisms.
- aflag 7y agoHasn't it been doing so for billions of years now?
- jjoonathan 7y agoOnly with strong selective pressure killing off the bad mutations (with is many/most of them). "But most human babies don't die. There are a bunch of mutations per generation, but not an exponentially compounded bunch of infant deaths, so how does our population get rid of bad mutations?" Because sperm are unit tests. The overwhelming majority of them die. You've got to regularly run the unit tests if you want to keep the codebase healthy :)