Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> Andy Toth <antst20+@pitt.edu> writes:
>
> > is there any 'evidence' to indicate that amino
> > acids were ever coded with 2 base pairs? why would the system begin at
> > three?
>
> Yes, there is some 'evidence'. We actually got it as an exercise in a
> lovely little course on noise and randomness in biology to derive a
> likely 2 base pair code. It turns out that the third base pair is not
> as significant as the first two, and for most amino acids it is
> redundant. When you move beyond the primordial soup and don't want to
> share your survival tricks with everything in the vicinity, then a
> less error-prone transcription starts to make sense.
??
"Don't want to share your survival tricks with everything in the
vicinity"?
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:50:43 MDT