Re: Evolution being slow ...

From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Sat Apr 21 2001 - 15:43:17 PDT


not James Tauber but some unknown entity wrote:

> > Three decades ago, Frank Salisbury of Utah State University described the
> > odds this way: "Imagine one hundred million trillion planets, each with an
> > ocean with lots of DNA fragments that reproduce one million times per
> > second, with a mutation occurring each time. In four billion years, it would
> > still take trillions of universes to produce a single gene -- if they got
> > lucky."

Yawn. Of course this means that each mutation is random, i.e. a random walk.
It doesn't take a genius to realize each mutation sees a gradient in fitness
space.



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