Hacker News Reader

I read long ago about someone doing computer simulations, finding that the current table is near optimal when it comes to error resilience (against mutations etc) as well as encoding efficiency IIRC.

This would answer why most are using it now. If other cells uses a different mapping that's less optimal, they'll have a harder time to reproduce, and thus lose out over time.

View on HN

That was in the April 2004 issue of Scientific American: Evolution Encoded.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26047680?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...

https://wps.prenhall.com/wps/media/objects/12330/12626747/my...

That would be it. Thanks for digging it up!

Yeah I think the answer is pretty clear why there's one. It was slightly better than the others in some ways like error resistance (important on a young, ie recently formed, where there's no atmosphere to protect from UV and other comic radiation) and then it just out competed. It's easy to forget just how long it took to go from single celled life (4000 MYA) to multi celled life (~2100 MYA, first fossil evidence at least). That's almost 2 billion years for different versions of DNA/RNA/Amino acids to be tried and tested with almost no chance that we'd find fossil evidence of it. (Not even sure if you could tell from a fossil at all honestly)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com