I think I read something about this somewhere – it is because the 4-base system is the most efficient.
For life to survive, DNA has to be able to be reproduced both quickly and accurately. Even if there were any other systems (with different numbers of bases) initially, they wouldn’t have been so good at reproducing. Life using these systems wouldn’t have been able to adapt so quickly to any changing conditions around them and so these creatures would have died out. So the 4-base system was chosen through evolution!
Some scientists compared how quickly DNA would reproduce if it had different numbers of bases. They found that if there were two or six bases, life would have evolved much more slowly, setting evolution back by billions of years!
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Susan commented on :
I think I read something about this somewhere – it is because the 4-base system is the most efficient.
For life to survive, DNA has to be able to be reproduced both quickly and accurately. Even if there were any other systems (with different numbers of bases) initially, they wouldn’t have been so good at reproducing. Life using these systems wouldn’t have been able to adapt so quickly to any changing conditions around them and so these creatures would have died out. So the 4-base system was chosen through evolution!
Some scientists compared how quickly DNA would reproduce if it had different numbers of bases. They found that if there were two or six bases, life would have evolved much more slowly, setting evolution back by billions of years!