DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)

Biological Parallel

Genetic-redundancy creates maintenance burden—Escherichia coli must replicate, proofread via dna-repair-mechanisms, and copy every duplicated gene sequence. DRY minimizes organizational genome size: each concept exists in one canonical location, reducing dna-replication costs and eliminating synchronization failures. Yeast with bloated genomes suffer slower cell division and higher mutation rates from Muller's ratchet—the irreversible accumulation of deleterious mutations in asexual lineages. Bdelloid rotifers, asexual for 80 million years, survive through extreme genome maintenance rather than redundancy. Code duplication is not just inelegant; it is metabolically expensive and evolutionarily maladaptive. Every duplicate is another sequence to mutate, repair, and synchronize.