3 ms·
Several thoughts (from someone with only intro-level biology, fwiw): 1. I think a lot of biological why's might be fundamentally un-answerable except for "pure
by brianchu 13y ago
Several thoughts (from someone with only intro-level biology, fwiw):
1. I think a lot of biological why's might be fundamentally un-answerable except for "pure statistical randomness." That's just the branch that evolution happened to fall towards.
2. Or perhaps it is answerable. In terms of costs and benefits, it could be that the cost of the additional complexity in replication, transcription, translation and all the tasks DNA serves outweighs the error-reduction that is possible with additional base pairs (either by allowing triplets/quadruplets/etc or by allowing greater redundancy in mapping to proteins). There are probably diminishing returns in error reduction after having two base pairs.