Notices by TinyFern ⚜️ Christ is King (tinyfern@poa.st)

@cirnog @hazlin @deprecated_ii

Something I see thrown around is the idea that permutations are sufficient to achieve a result. If you write a computer program which starts with the sentence “I like to eat ice cream” and is trying to achieve the sentence “Lime juice is refreshing”, you can make it happen pretty easily in evolutionary timescales at one mutation per generation, if none of the sentences in between have to be functional sentences. The problem with that is, biological evolution needs every change in between to be not only functional but successful enough to spread those mutations into the next generation without the offspring being disadvantaged. Suddenly you realise how many random mutations are actually highly deleterious and compromise functionality - how many functional sentences are there between “I like to eat ice cream” and “Lime juice is refreshing”? Rolling the dice on each letter and space every time makes it apparent how easy it is to make it gibberish; similarly, the human genome can easily accrue mutations which result in a lot more dead babies than Spidermen.