[ExI] Evolution

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Thu, May 21, 2020 at 4:10 PM The Avantguardian via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> But the error rate that you and John complain about is an essential part
> of evolution. If DNA replication was 100% accurate then none of us would be
> here. Life would never have progressed beyond the RNA world or whatever the
> prototypical life scenario was. The ability to modulate the error rate and
> fine tune it over time and space is a feature of DNA-based wetware, and not
> a bug. Perfect fidelity is unnatural and changing environmental conditions
> will inevitably render any "perfect" organism extinct.


### You are right but there is more to the story - while some non-zero
error rate is needed as the grist for evolution, the error rate also puts
limits on the amount of information that can be stored per generation in an
organism. The higher the error rate, the faster an organism loses genetic
information and with high error rate only small amounts of information can
be stored. It takes only a couple hundred genes to just survive as the
simplest possible organism in some environments but it takes thousands of
genes to make an organism capable of writing these words, so humans need
better DNA repair than mycoplasma. If our genome was more stable, we might
be able to achieve much higher performance, at least as long as our
population was large enough to generate sufficient variation for evolution
to act on.

I don't know if human evolution is constrained by insufficient diversity
generation (which is proportional to mutation rate) or by information loss
(which also increases with mutation rate but is not described by the same
formula). My guess is that the latter is a bigger obstacle to human
greatness but I am too lazy at this time of the night to do a proper
literature search.

Rafal
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