ORIGINAL PAPER Drake’s rule as a consequence of approaching channel capacity

Abstract How mutations accumulate in genomes is the cen-tral question of molecular evolution theories. However, our understanding of this process is far from complete. Drake’s rule is a notoriously universal property of genomes from microbes to mammals—the number of (functional) mutations per-genome per-generation is approximately constant within a phylum, despite the orders of magnitude differences in ge-nome sizes and diverse populations ’ properties. So far, there is no concise explanation for this phenomenon. A formal model for the storage of genetic information suggests that a genome of any species operates near its maximum informational stor-age capacity, and the mutation rate per-genome per-generation is near its upper limit, providing a simple explanation for the rule with minimal assumptions