Dwarkesh (host)

Which is a tiny genome.

And has shrunk over time, starting from the original bacteria that was engulfed.

so so you will accumulate mutations and you can't resist them so you'll lose genes so your genome shrinks that's what happened to the mitochondria you just can't maintain a bacterial size genome so maybe worth explaining why it's the case that sex is preferable to lateral gene transfer in the sense of being the systematic pooling and parallel search across gene space so if um

If there is this advantage of sex and then bacteria have some antecedent to it, why didn't they just get the whole thing?

Is it just that it's not compatible with their size?

What is keeping the metagenome around?

Right.

As I was reading your book, just to ease my own ignorance, I was trying to come up with an analogy.

And so please let me know in which ways it's naive.

And also, thanks for tolerating all my other naive questions today.

But here in Silicon Valley, maybe an analogy that will work for us is to think about, let's say, a GitHub repository.

And then- I'm already out of my depth now.

Basically, you just have this code base, and then you have ways in which you do version control.

So the usual way this is done, and this may be analogous to sexual recombination, is that somebody makes what is called, they make a new branch.

In that branch, they might make changes which are organized next to the function that they're trying to change.

And then so when the maintainer is looking at the code, they can see, here was what the original code was at this point.

Here's the modification to that point of code.

And you see the diff.

And then you can merge it back if it seems sensible.

And so the analogy here might be sexual recombination that's organized along the relevant gene.