[Condorman]

You misunderstand. Your analogy isn't the best, but I'll continue to use it in order to explain.

When the recipe mutates, the line indicating the amount of chocolate get repeated. You now have a double-chocolate cake. Mmmmm....

But since you have two entries for chocolate now, what if the next time you bake it, the second entry changes to raspberries? Now you have three cake species living in your recipe box. A chocolate cake, a double-chocolate cake, and a chocolate-raspberry cake.

Now, when are you inviting us over, because I'm suddenly getting hungry?

[unspun]

When the recipe mutates, the line indicating the amount of chocolate get repeated. You now have a double-chocolate cake. Mmmmm..

Doesn't sound like a recipe for survival, for that cake. It's still an exercise in falling up-hill.

[Rachumlakenschlaff]

Condorman wrote:
When the recipe mutates, the line indicating the amount of chocolate get repeated. You now have a double-chocolate cake. Mmmmm....

But since you have two entries for chocolate now, what if the next time you bake it, the second entry changes to raspberries? Now you have three cake species living in your recipe box. A chocolate cake, a double-chocolate cake, and a chocolate-raspberry cake.

It seems to me that we have one recipe, the one for the chocolate-raspberry cake. It consists of the instructions for making a chocolate cake but a new ingredient has been added. So, have we learned how to make a chocolate-raspberry cake? No, we know how to make a chocolate cake but we now have an extra ingredient, raspberries, with no instructions on how to use it. A clever baker, using his intelligence and experience, could further alter the instructions and ingredients to work with the new ingredient so as to produce a chocolate-raspberry cake that someone might want to eat.

What if the cake were instead baked by a robot that was programmed to bake cakes? What will the robot (or, more precisely, it's programming) do with the raspberries if the instructions for processing the chocolate were not duplicated along with the raspberries? If the robot ignored the raspberries for lack of instructions, then it makes a chocolate cake. But how does the robot know to ignore the raspberries? What if it instead applied the existing instructions to the new list of ingredients? Let's say that there were originally 10 ingredients and 20 instructions. The chocolate was ingredient 4 and instruction 9 was applied to ingredient 5. After the mutation of ingredients, we have 11 ingredients and 20 instructions with the raspberries being the new 5th ingredient.  Instruction 9 is now applied to raspberries instead of, say, the flour. Once the programming encounters the new 5th ingredient, all subsequent processing steps are out of step with the remaining ingredients.

What if the instructions for processing the chocolate were duplicated along with the raspberries? Raspberries are kind of lumpy compared to the powdered chocolate the instructions were designed for. One step for the chocolate is to sift it. I wonder what will happen when I try to sift the raspberries.

Now, when are you inviting us over, because I'm suddenly getting hungry?

How's Thursday at 8? I'll be serving whatever is made after I randomly change one of the ingredients to something else I have in my kitchen. And because you're the guest of honor, you get to eat the first piece!