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TomaszA3 t1_ish7nri wrote

Reply to comment by sunplaysbass in When it's said 99.9% of human DNA is the same in all humans, is this referring to only coding DNA or both coding and non-coding DNA combined? by PeanutSalsa

I'll just drop here that small things can disable or enable almost entirety of other "code". Like, change an "if" to opposite symbol, 0.0...1% of the code has been changed but 99.9...% of code is not executing at all. Or only half of total code is executing on one branch and other half at another.

0.6% in such very highly flexible codebase should definitely bear massive functional(or not, but evolution) changes.

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sometimesgoodadvice t1_isp75d7 wrote

An interesting analogy but slightly flawed in terms of looking at genomes of already viable organisms. A person whose genome is sequenced to compare to the reference has already undergone the selection criteria for viability and development. Basically, there are plenty of sites where single mutations would lead to a complete breakdown of making a "human" but those would never be seen in a sequenced genome.

The other main difference is that of course code is written to be concise and concrete. As far as I know, no one pastes in some random code that doesn't perform a function just in case it may be needed in the future. Of course, biology works precisely in that way and the genome is a mess of evolutionary history with plenty of space for modification without really resulting in any functional change. So a better example of those 0.6% may be that you can have typos in the comments of the code. In fact, for any large piece of software, I would be surprised if the comment section did not contain at least 0.5% typos.

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