[extropy-chat] Evolution Encoded

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

>From Scientific American: New discoveries about the rules governing how
genes encode proteins have revealed nature's sophisticated "programming" for
protecting life from catastrophic errors while accelerating evolution. The
DNA molecule contains nothing less than the secret of life, which permits
organisms to store themselves as a set of blueprints and convert this stored
information back into live metabolism.
Only in recent years have new discoveries about the code revealed just how
sophisticated a piece of programming it really is. Why nature chose these
basic rules and why they have survived three billion or so years of natural
selection have started to become clear. We can now show that the code's
rules may actually speed evolution while protecting life from making
disastrous errors in protein synthesis.
When we speak of the "code" and "decoding," we are being quite literal.
Genetic instructions are stored in DNA and RNA, both made of one type of
biochemical molecule, nucleic acid. But organisms are mostly built from (and
by) a very different type of molecule, protein. So although a gene is
traditionally defined as the sequence of nucleotides that describes a single
protein, the genetic sentence containing that description must first be
translated from one system of symbols into an entirely different kind of
system, rather like converting from Morse code to English.

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