Bruce Malone
Suppose I had a flash drive that held a lot of information. Now, when these first came out — and I know young people will have trouble even envisioning this — a 256-megabyte — that’s less than one gigabyte — flash drive cost about $100. And I didn’t want to buy a new one when they started to come out with two and four and eight and 16 GB flash drives.
So, I thought, you know what I’ll do? I’ll add a mutation.
So, I took a nail and a hammer and I just …bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Now I’ve mutated it. I made a random change.
Then I plugged it in and tested it and guess what?
It didn’t hold more information.
So then I added another nail, and a third and fourth nail. Each one is like a random mutational change to a complex structure.
In the end, my flash drive looked like this. Full of nails, full of mutations. And guess what? It didn’t work better. You see, mutations destroy information. They don’t add information.
And we’ve tested this. Fruit flies only have a 10 day life cycle. So every couple weeks you get a new generation. So we’ve taken chambers filled with thousands of fruit flies and added radiation which mutates changes their genetic information. What we end up with are dead fruit flies, twisted wings, different colored eyeballs, all sorts of variations, but mostly dead fruit flies.
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