Dwarkesh (host)

And you see this allele.

You see that allele.

And then I guess evolution here is a maintainer, which is then driving one of them to fixation.

The analogy for asexual reproduction, just cloning with mutation, would be, okay, you fork the repository.

Then you make a random change.

You just change some random variable.

You change a word.

You change a bit.

And almost every single time, this will be deleterious.

Yeah.

And even when it's not deleterious...

there's no merge functionality.

So these different, you've got millions of repositories that are then spawning millions of other repositories.

And even if some improvement has been made on one of them, there's no systematic way in which the improvements can be merged together.

Yeah, and then finally, lateral gene transfer.

So here's the analogy it might be.

Okay, so you've got one repository for, let's say, editing web pages and another repository for controlling airline software.

And what you just do is you take a random 500-line sequence in this web page editing software, and you just put it in a random point in the airplane management software.

And there's no...

So then I guess, honestly, I don't really have good intuition for why lateral gene transfer does not produce similar benefits to recombination.