My kid just read a passage out of some biologists book, wherein the author waxes lyrical about the beauty of DNA's advantage of not needing to be perfect.
That's not the beauty of DNA. The beauty of DNA is that life is cheap. It's very easy, and entertaining, to propagate one's species. Life is easy to create. and if there are mistakes in the DNA, die.
While tragic, it's far more than that. Say you have a population of 10,000 marmots. There occurs a DNA mutation offering that individual a slightly higher chance of surviving. How is that going to get into the rest of the population of marmots? Slowly, is the answer. J.B.S. Haldane asked this question back in the 1957, and his answer: 385,000 marmots who don't carry the mutation must die. It's going to take 77 generations to produce the ones who must die, and then you'll have a population of 10,000 with one DNA mutation who should all survive just a little bit better. If the population is smaller, then fewer die. Say a population of ten. You can do this one on a sheet of paper. It takes 5 generations to get the mutation into every individual, presuming the mutation is dominant and not recessive, all offpsring inherit the beneficial mutation, and that only two children survive to mate; the others die young). And in those five generations, 29 must die, out of the 60 who were there. Half. That's the most optimistic it can get. But if only half the offspring have the beneficial the gene, the situation turns more dire. Then it's infinite generations, and still only one individual inherits the mutation. The mutation never moves into the entire population. Of ten.
You need a big population, lots of time per mutation, and be willing to kill off a lot of the undesirables, we'll call them.
Darwinian evolution is a bitch. Life to a Darwinist means nothing. Literally nothing. It has to be nothing for Darwinism to work. The Nazis figured this out; that's why we hate them so: you need to kill a lot of dark-haired people to make everybody blonde.
What surprises me as a scientist is how few evolutionary biologists realize this is the case. Every one I've spoken with (and to be fair I've never spoken with any microbiologist at Archer-Daniels-Midland or Adecoagro, etc, who mutate bacteria all the time to make amino acids, polypeptides, proteins and other useful biologicals for medicine, all from corn) is that they seem to care for each and every individual of a species out there. Why do they feel such a strong need to counter evolution? Why do they think an individual is sacred? Or even valuable (beyond what can be harvested)?
It's puzzled me for decades.
