[hyperpallium]

> A similar mystery is why DNA chose a base64 nucleic coding system for 21 amino acids and a few punctuations.

This implies a kind of Cambrian explosion of coding systems for nature to "choose" from. Maybe xenogenetics will help us recognize its remnants.

[ethbro]

As my father pointed out to a younger me, 'Evolution is lazy. It would always rather repurpose something already created than build something new from scratch.'

So, why base64? Because there was already a nice base64 library in the evolutionary repo...