OrdinaryClay wrote:Rumraket wrote:
I just mean one that never came to exist. In this sense I would say that technically a stillborn, or dead-on-arrival organism (that died due to lethal mutations), is still a realized genomic sequence. It existed in reality once upon a time.
The set that has never come to exist is calculable and so large as to beyond even the time scales of the universe. That set is not relevant.
Relevant to what?
OrdinaryClay wrote:My discussion is restricted to the set that has existed. That's the sample space I'm talking about.
Okay. What about that space? The set of genomic sequences that has existed, what are you saying about it?
OrdinaryClay wrote:Rumraket wrote:But at the phenotypic level I believe it is more common than at the genetic level, because for the most part, we inhabit similar environments and are subject to similar selective pressures. And there are usually many different genetic pathways to the same phenotypic result.
There are many examples of convergent evolution. Then why are there not more phenotypes that map their own genomes.
I'm not convinced there is a "why" there. Your question seems to me to have the same intellectual content as "why is the world so made so that we see blue in the way we see blue and don't see green in it's place, and blue in the place of green?".
Would you expect there to be more phenotypes that map their own genomes among the set of realized phenotypes? Or less? And if so, why? I presume you're asking because you're suprised. Why are you suprised?