About organic codes

According to modern biology, only the genetic code and the cultural codes exist in nature, and we know from paleontogy that those codes are separated by nearly four billion years, that is to say by virtually all the history of life. In this framework, the codes belong to the extreme margins of evolution, and are therefore exceptional events, truly frozen accidents.
According to the scheme of Figure 8-3, instead, those two codes were only the first and the last of the great inventions of life, and in no way are they isolated exceptions because many more codes appeared in between. If we now take a look at what did happen in evolution, we realize that organic codes have some intriguing properties.
(1) The living forms which acquired a new organic code have never driven other forms to extinction. Eukaryotes did not remove prokaryotes, and metazoa never removed monocellular eukaryotes. Every organic code represents a stable form of life, and once born has never disappeared. While morphological structures did rise and fall countless times, “deep” organic codes have never disappeared. This tells us that they truly are the fundamentals of life, the invariants that persist while everything else is changing.
(2) A new organic code has never abolished previous codes. The signal transduction rules did not remove the splicing rules, and none of them has abolished the genetic code. A new code has always been added to previous ones, and in so doing has always produced an increase of complexity in the system. The structural complexity of some organisms did indeed decrease in time, as many semplification cases clearly show, but the complexity of the codes has never been lowered. Even the animals which lost or reduced the greatest number of parts, in order to lead a parasitic life, have conserved all fundamental codes of animal life. The number of organic codes is therefore a new measure of biological complexity, and probably it is more fundamental than all other parameters which have been proposed so far.
(3) The genetic code is present in all living creatures, but the other organic codes appeared in increasingly smaller groups, thus giving origin to a veritable “pyramid” of life.