  The development of a large non-coding fraction in eukaryotic DNA and the
phenomenon of the code-bloat in the field of evolutionary computations show a
striking similarity. This seems to suggest that (in the presence of mechanisms
of code growth) the evolution of a complex code can't be attained without
maintaining a large inactive fraction. To test this hypothesis we performed
computer simulations of an evolutionary toy model for Turing machines, studying
the relations among fitness and coding/non-coding ratio while varying mutation
and code growth rates. The results suggest that, in our model, having a large
reservoir of non-coding states constitutes a great (long term) evolutionary
advantage.
