Say, in the context of finding microbial life on Mars (i.e., organisms that evolved from the start with six nucleotides, not just taking current terrestrial organisms and swapping out the nucleic acids and ribosomes).
Say, in the context of finding microbial life on Mars (i.e., organisms that evolved from the start with six nucleotides, not just taking current terrestrial organisms and swapping out the nucleic acids and ribosomes).
Proteins aren’t the only end product of DNA. RNA is also important. See point 2.
Large parts of regulation are through structural elements at both DNA and RNA level that shortened genes would disrupt.
While your rate of error per base wouldn’t be higher. The chance of that error mattering is higher. With 3 base codons the third is a “wobble base” that if changed will still likely code for the correct product or at least a similar one. Whereas with 2 base codons there is no wobble, any base change is more likely to result in some functional difference.
evolution is rarely concerned with being the most efficient but rather what works. Things are janky and a lot of the complexity of life stems from that jankiness.
Came to the comment section for your 3rd point, even with the “wobble” we have several single point mutations that are disastrous having only 2 BP per codon would be much worse and if anything I would assume the better medium would have more BP per codon with more redundancy