Hypothesis: it’s not so much the
content of the genes that’s brittle, as that there are very few proteins as “smart” in how they walk the genome as CRISPR is (and even it’s no Einstein.)
There are likely cellular genetic repair mechanisms—especially in “small” genebases that don’t use fancy tricks like methylation/acetylation—which “hardcode” assumptions about gene number, gene size, positions of important proteins, etc.
Just because DNA itself is a robust data-structure (with features like start-stop tags, commented sections, etc.) doesn’t mean that all the algorithms (proteins) that have evolved to utilize that data-structure query or mutate it in equally-robust ways.
Imagine a codebase started off by a brilliant and strict engineer... and then followed on by a million forks-of-forks-of-forks, all done by average Joes just “scratching their own itch.” That’s the type of software encoded in 99% of the DNA on Earth. The codebases where “every line counts” and has been carefully selected for are far fewer—mitochondria, certainly, but i hesitate to name any other clear candidate.
There are likely cellular genetic repair mechanisms—especially in “small” genebases that don’t use fancy tricks like methylation/acetylation—which “hardcode” assumptions about gene number, gene size, positions of important proteins, etc.
Just because DNA itself is a robust data-structure (with features like start-stop tags, commented sections, etc.) doesn’t mean that all the algorithms (proteins) that have evolved to utilize that data-structure query or mutate it in equally-robust ways.
Imagine a codebase started off by a brilliant and strict engineer... and then followed on by a million forks-of-forks-of-forks, all done by average Joes just “scratching their own itch.” That’s the type of software encoded in 99% of the DNA on Earth. The codebases where “every line counts” and has been carefully selected for are far fewer—mitochondria, certainly, but i hesitate to name any other clear candidate.