Pt 2. Gaining Insights on a Flawed Code

One of the most fascinating ideas presented in the text thus far deals with the genetic code. I want to start this week’s post with a short, thought-provoking passage from the book:

"If the code is arbitrary, one code would have any particular benefit over any other. There would be no reason for a selective' bottleneck', in which one version of the code had, in Crick's words, 'such a selective advantage over all its competitors that it alone survived'. But if there were no bottleneck, Crick wondered, why didn't several codes coexist in different organisms?” ( Lane 63).

When thinking of how the genetic code first was first “invented”, we must reconsider LUCA.

Although we know all organisms descend from one common ancestor, the exact root to the evolutionary tree of life is still unknown. However, we do know that the life evolved just once by chance. Thus raising an interesting question:  If our code is so perfectly written, why is it flawed?  

The play of chance inherently present in the code as well as the Adaptational ability of codons explains how genomic-level evolution occurs. However, Nature's blind cryptographer is very resistant to change (beneficial mutations are rare). The code’s glitches can be best described as areas of optimization with a little help from natural selection. The Genetic Code has yet to be recreated or exceeded. It has fewer glitches than one million alternative randomly generated codes (Lane 48). The accumulation of beneficial mutations over time and the purging of deleterious ones is how the code evolves. More specifically, the code evolves from the inherent variances present within the code.