A digital DNA system favours the superiority of unidirectional inheritance over ‘Lamarckian’ inheritance
Fig 2
Comparison of mean Hamming distance between the ancestor and descendent generations under a range of mutational regimes.
Each regime (Table 1) was iterated ten times across 20 generations, and Hamming distances were calculated at each generation for each replicate by comparison to the ancestor sequence. Regime 1: ‘zero’ mutation control (1_zero; black line); Regime 2: synonymous DNA-level mutation (2_synDNA; blue line); Regime 3: nonsynonymous DNA-level mutation (3_nonsynDNA; purple line); Regime 4: random DNA-level mutation (4_ranDNA; green line); Regime 5: nonsynonymous music-level mutation (5_nonsynMusic; orange line); Regime 6: nonsynonymous DNA-level mutation plus nonsynonymous music-level mutation (6_nonsynDNA+Music; red line). The x-axis shows generation number, y-axis shows mean Hamming distances for each regime calculated at each generation from comparisons between ancestor and the ten iterations.