"Suppose this population migrates to a region, like the Upper Nile, where it is an advantage to be very tall. Natural selection need only make the height-enhancing versions of these 100 genes just a little more common in the population, and now the average person will be likely to inherit 55 of them, say, instead of 50, and be taller as a result. Since the height-enhancing versions of the genes already exist, natural selection can go to work right away and the population can adapt quickly to its new home."
From the NYT.
Recent research on genomics suggest that Nature reuses pieces of successful code that lie around. I can see a similar trend in Computer Science, snipets of code that solve software engineers problems, stick around.
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