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Re:Animals That Taste Only Saltiness by whatshisface on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @05:45PM (#8111194)
But wouldn't there be an equal chance of the mutation reversing itself? This is true in digital transmissions, why not in DNA?
Re:Animals That Taste Only Saltiness by dllthomas on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @09:07PM (#8111910)
A gene isn't one bit.

For starters, there are four nucleotides in DNA (A, C, G, and T). Simplifying our model of mutation to "a flipped bit" where mutation takes takes a nucleotide to another one with equal likelihood, and only one nucleotide in that position makes it functional, there is a 3/3 chance that a mutation breaks it but only a 1/3 chance that a subsequent mutation fixes it.

Next, there's the fact that every gene is a sequence of many nucleotides. The odds that the next mutation of the same gene would happen in the same place is low.

Finally, many mutations don't take the "flipped bit" form we assumed above. Repetitions, insertions and deletions also happen, and may be even less reversible (deletion of a meaningful portion would be exceedingly unlikely to be recreated by chance - what provides the information about what should have been there?).

Re:Animals That Taste Only Saltiness by bdonlan on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @09:05PM (#8111902)
No, this is not true, even in digital transmissions.

Consider this digital signal:

0000000000

Let's say there's a 1% chance of a bit flipping. But any one of these 10 bits could flip. So for, say, the third bit to flip there's a 0.1% chance to become 0010000000.

Now, to go back there's still a 0.1% chance - but there's a 0.9% chance that _another_ bit will flip. At which point you need two bit flips to go back to your original value.

As you can see, since errors accumulate, the probability of wandering back to a working version is much lower than that of producing increasingly broken versions instead.

Re:Animals That Taste Only Saltiness by tiglionabbit on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @06:17PM (#8111308)
Because there are so many more ways for things to be wrong than for them to be right.
Re:Animals That Taste Only Saltiness by rectangletangle on Wednesday July 30, 2014 @07:26PM (#8111567)
It's also possible that there's some subtle form of selection against the trait, that we're just unaware of.