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aaaaaaaaaab

The genome is the ultimate legacy code:

- it's been written for billions of years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Earliest_biologica...)

- without any sort of upfront architecture or planning

- the development methodology can be summarized as "change characters randomly and see if it compiles"

- incredibly bloated (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA)

- contains random snippets copy/pasted from other codebases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_viral_element)

- the only success criteria is that the "program" shouldn't "crash" before it can make a copy of itself

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> incredibly bloated

This would actually be preferable to how DNA seems to evolve. In most systems, there's actually quite an acute constraint to genome length due to the Error Threshold; when a genome gets too large, it has too many mutations and therefore the 'fittest' genome, often called the 'master' genome, cannot be sustained in the population. Therefore, there's quite a lot of evolution where the genome becomes essentially minified. Most often, this is done by overlapping genes on the DNA, (mostly by shifting the reading frame by one or two nucleotides for one of the two genes).

As someone who works on software for DNA analysis, this is spot on

I wonder if one were to clean up the code, removing all bloat, keeping only the relevant pieces, how would that human turn out?

Fixing our inverted retina would be one of the low hanging fruits:

>The vertebrate retina is inverted in the sense that the light sensing cells are in back of the retina, so that light has to pass through layers of neurons and capillaries before it reaches the rods and cones. In contrast, in the cephalopod retina the photoreceptors are in front, with processing neurons and capillaries behind them. Because of this, cephalopods do not have a blind spot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina

I want this comment as a poster.

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