I think the “nearby” part is important … I thought his claim was basically that if I’m an ATP production machine, I need the genome to be really close to me distance-wise (like within X nanometers, for some number X that I don’t know), so that if I have a broken part then a replacement can be quickly manufactured on demand in the right location. So having 100 copies of the gene that are physically attached to each other doesn’t help at all towards solving the problem, and in fact makes the problem worse.
I really don’t know much biology, I’m just going off my memory of the book :-)
I think the “nearby” part is important … I thought his claim was basically that if I’m an ATP production machine, I need the genome to be really close to me distance-wise (like within X nanometers, for some number X that I don’t know), so that if I have a broken part then a replacement can be quickly manufactured on demand in the right location. So having 100 copies of the gene that are physically attached to each other doesn’t help at all towards solving the problem, and in fact makes the problem worse.
I really don’t know much biology, I’m just going off my memory of the book :-)
He definitely did say something to that effect and it definitely is easier to have the genome near the cell wall of a small cell than a large cell.
You say “the genome” but note that one bacterium (i.e. one cell) can have more than one copy of its entire genome inside it, e.g. “many bacteria harbor multiple copies of their genome per cell”, “Enormous bacterium uses thousands of genome copies to its advantage”, etc. That’s what I was (implicitly) referring to. :-)
I did not realize that. Whoops.