I have a suspicion about why DNA is base 4 vs base 2.
It has to do with the binding strengths of tRNA to mRNA during translation. Base 2 increases the length of codons needed to code for 23 amino acids from 3 to 5, which may lead to less fidelity in the resulting amino acid sequence. That is, partial matches have higher binding strength compared to base 4, which increases the chances the wrong tRNA is loaded. This could also make longer amino acid sequences harder to create—an accidentally loaded stop codon terminates translation!
I have a suspicion about why DNA is base 4 vs base 2.
It has to do with the binding strengths of tRNA to mRNA during translation. Base 2 increases the length of codons needed to code for 23 amino acids from 3 to 5, which may lead to less fidelity in the resulting amino acid sequence. That is, partial matches have higher binding strength compared to base 4, which increases the chances the wrong tRNA is loaded. This could also make longer amino acid sequences harder to create—an accidentally loaded stop codon terminates translation!