🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3bk4l1INNk1q@newsman.csu.murdoch.edu.au>,
Clare Constantine <constant@csuvax1.murdoch.edu.au> writes:
>[snip]
 Of course a program that 
>was anyting like DNA would be considered very poor - heaps of 
>irrelevant code that does nothing - two copies of every subroutine!
Dear Clare,
	Shannon showed many years ago that putting the maximum information
through a channel requires redundancy--that is, you increase the transfer rate
until some errors occur and use the redundancy to correct them.  Thus DNA is
a very good program indeed.  Furthermore, just because most of the DNA does
not code for anything, this does not mean it's useless.  As we find out more 
about the genome, some of the "irrelevant code" will be found to have a func-
tion, and in any event, much of the so-called garbage appears to be the raw
material from which new functioning genes are derived.  Families of proteins
seem to have been formed from gene duplication and subsequent mutation in at
least some cases.
				Yours,
				Bill Tivol