All-powerful Selection to the rescue?
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this absurd mutation/selection system is a very reasonable approximation of the Primary Axiom of biology. It very obviously will fail to improve or even maintain grades - for many reasons. The most fundamental reason why this type of selection fails is the incredibly weak relationship between individual letters in the text and the over-all performance of the student. The correlation will be essentially zero. This is an excellent illustration of the Princess and the Nucleotide Paradox. If this scenario seems absurd to you, try to understand one more thing. The Primary Axiom claims that this very same mutation/selection system is actually what wrote the entire biochemistry textbook in the first place. There was never any intelligent agent acting as author, or even as editor. The problem of the Princess and the Nucleotide Paradox becomes even greater when we understand the phenomenon of homeostasis. Homeostasis is the natural phenomenon wherein all living things self-regulate themselves to stay the same, even as circumstances change. A good example would be warm-blooded animals in a cold climate. Homeostasis results from an incredibly complex network of sensors and regulators within each cell. Although it is too complex to explain (or even analyze in detail), it is universally agreed that it is both operational and highly effective in all life systems. The phenomenon of homeostasis is a little like having a super-duper, self-adjusting mattress. If a tennis ball is put beneath this mattress, the mattress will automatically adjust itself via a myriad of complex mechanical mechanisms to effectively level the sleeping surface. But in real biology, it is worse – it is more like 13 self-adjusting mattresses on top of each other (homeostasis operates at every level of biological organization - from molecules to man). This makes things much more difficult for our Princess – who needs to sense the pea, or more accurately, read the Braille, through the mattresses.