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comp_biolast Thursday at 3:44 AM1 replyview on HN

This is a fascinating niche of evolutionary biology that I have worked in for a while. The short answer is that yes, as far as we can tell all organisms evolve increasingly more efficient replication machinery, however at some point the strength of selection is no longer powerful enough to overcome the strength of genetic drift and some degree of error rate persists. As far as we can tell it seems like population size governs where this balance ends up such that small populations have high mutation rates and large populations have reduced mutation rates. Michael Lynch coined the term drift barrier hypothesis to describe this phenomenon. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23077252/


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ajuclast Thursday at 7:04 AM

If the organism is too efficient at preventing mutations - it would evolve slower, right?

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