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From: pell@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Anthony Pelletier)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology,sci.bio
Subject: Re: Evolutionary factors in human psychology
Message-ID: <5184@sigi.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 2 Apr 88 19:45:27 GMT
References: <6107@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1085@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu> <764@actnyc.UUCP> <48002@sun.uucp>
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In article <48002@sun.uucp> randolph@sun.UUCP (Randolph Fritz) writes:

>Genetic space isn't limited; most of an organism's DNA is never
>expressed.  A good bit of it doesn't code for anything.  Apparently,
>__Randolph Fritz, randolph@sun.com; sun!randolph

I think this needs to be qualified a bit.  If we are talking about
vertibrates (indeed, most eukariotes), you are quite correct.
In the case of bacteria, where part of survival success is being able to
reproduce rapidly, an estimate
of 90% would be close for how much of the linear coding capacity is used.
In the case of viruses, some actually use both strands for short stretches
and alternate coding frames in a givin region.
For organisms such as these, it is clear that selection to conserve space
is strong.  Before you have  way to replicate from many origins, a way to keep
a large genome organized and a great method for separating large daughter
chromosome, smaller is much better.

-tony