Tiny changes in gene expression make big difference in eye size of fruit flies

Evo-Devo! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydqReeTV_vk

Given how evolution seems to work in practice - building beings out of discrete organs and they scale up/down to an optimal size depending on conditions - I'd expect that this will hold for most things.

I'm not nature, but the low-entropy way of building these systems would be to have biological equivalents of variables that control the size (and probably shape) of different features. That would be an evolutionary advantage, because species with genomes organised that way would be amenable to evolving into local optimums.

To rephrase; evolution works best when there is a small area of the genome where tiny changes have large impacts on the size of an organ without altering its function.

I'm surprised a tiny change in genes doesn't completely destroy the viability of the organism. You can change one character in code and it no longer compiles or the entire thing crashes.

Lookup Walter Gehring's fruit fly experiments if you want something similar and also want to be grossed out.

Dna is the last frontier of programming. It's gods programming language, so to speak.

There may be a day where we can grow machines. Self healing space ships etc

A little bit surprised we are still so early in our understanding of it.