Family That Walks on All Fours

I saw a touching and educational Nova episode tonight about a family in Turkey, many of whose members are afflicted with a genetic disease that interferes with their ability to walk upright.

It's fascinating how our genome leads to our actual morphology. It's as if our genes were designed for evolution. I wonder if other organisms (viruses?) or ecosystems fail because the way their genotype encodes their phenotype doesn't lend itself to stable mutations like ours does. Perhaps this trait could be defined and measured as a reduction in the percentage of possible mutations that yield catastrophic (unsurvivable) failures.

There are lots of ways to encode (compress) information. Some just seem to be more useful (meaningful?) than others.

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