“Objectively, ambiguity in the genetic code should be deleterious; you end up generating a random pool of proteins,” Dipti Nayak, senior author of the paper from UC Berkeley, said in a press statement. “But biological systems are more ambiguous than we give them credit to be and that ambiguity is actually a feature—it’s not a bug.”

What a beautiful way to restate the fact that genetics are fundamentally a language for it is the same exact mechanism that imbues human language with power.