How Will Biological Progress Transform the World? “Imagine a genetic code with four-base codons in place of three, but still only encoding 20 amino acids. Every mutation from a coding codon could land on an unused codon in a 4D space of 256 combinations. We could make a fail-fast genetic code that cannot evolve.”
In our evolution, the sparse 64-to-20 encoding allows some soft errors to accumulate in the adjacent possible. In Endy’s thought experiment, they’d start with evolved artifacts that arose through traditional means, where codon adjacency is endemic to the process. If they then remap it to a sparse coding matrix, with “firewalls” between all coding regions, they’d have to reengineer the codon-amino acid mapping, and I would think that’s non-trivial. I like moon shot thinkers like that!
Many humans seem to presume we are the endpoint of evolution, so it’s good to give them some hope. =)
On enhancing human intelligence genetically? Drew: “I would ask the physicists what the heat flux limit is for the brain before it melts”
I got to go get my mic on to go on stage now… Agenda
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