All-powerful Selection to the rescue?
49
resulting in massive increase in “noise”, and loss of resolution. There must be a vanishingly small correlation between any given nucleotide (a single molecule), and a whole organism’s probability of reproductive success! The nucleotide and the organism are very literally worlds apart. Our Princess (i.e. natural selection on the level of the whole organism), in fact, has to perceive differences which are just above the atomic level. We do not generally see individual pixels on our television - so imagine the difficulty of trying to select a specific TV set at the store by trying to evaluate the quality of each separate pixel (by eye), on all the various TV sets available. But it’s really much worse than this. In a biological system, we are talking about pixels, within pixels, within pixels, within pixels. We are talking about a very long chain of events separating the direct effect of a given nucleotide and very remote consequences on the whole organism level. There is a logarithmic dilution at each step – at each level there is an order of magnitude loss of resolution and correspondence. It is like measuring the impact of a butterfly’s stroke - on a hurricane system which is a thousand miles away. It is a little like trying to select for a specific soldier, based upon the performance of his army. This whole picture is totally upside down! Yet this is the essence of the Primary Axiom! The Primary Axiom sees a human genome (6 billion nucleotides), and imagines that each unit is selected for (or not) individually, based merely upon a limited amount of reproductive sieving on the level of the whole organism. As we will be seeing, this is totally impossible for many reasons. To better understand the nature of The Princess and the Nucleotide Paradox, let’s imagine a new method for improving textbooks. Let’s start with a high school biochemistry textbook (equivalent to let us