Well at the very least, allmendream, to ask questions as to "how" and "why" indicates that the problems to which such questions refer might be valid problems. That's progress.
To answer your question: The "survivors" weren't programmed for "success" "internally," each and every one. Rather, they were responding to a non-local cause "external" to themselves. The "non-survivors" simply weren't "in communicado" with that cause or were irrelevant to it. (So to speak.)
The "secret" of Life does not consist in what cells do; it consists in the organizational principle that governs the entire biological organism, a complex system in Nature.
There is a common presupposition in science that the way to study a complex system is to reduce it to its parts, and then study the parts. The expectation here is that if we know what all the parts are doing, we just "add up" the results and get a full picture of the system.
But this is impossible, especially if the question is: What is Life? To study parts of a biological organism, you pretty much have to kill it first. But if you do, what do you expect to discover about Life?
"We murder to dissect," as a great poet put it.
Here's an analogy that might help, courtesy of the mathematician, complex systems theorist and theoretical biologist Robert Rosen:
Taking a hammer to a watch, for example, will give us a spectrum of parts all right; these may be separated and characterized to our heart's content, but only by a miracle will they tell us either how a watch works or how to make one. This is because two things have happened: application of the hammer has lost information about the original articulated watch and at the same time, it has added irrelevant information about the hammer. What the hammer has given us, then, is not so much a set of parts as a set of artifacts. — Life Itself, New York:Columbia University Press 1991, p. 22. [Emphasis added.]People clinging to a materialist, mechanistic view of Nature are missing the "big picture."
Or so it seems to me. FWIW.
Thank you so much for writing, dear amd!
How and why? What was the difference between those who were “programmed for success” and those that were not?
One had a better filing system to FIND the “in case of novel anti-ribosome antibiotic - break out THIS gene” part of the genome?
Couldn't I just show how fantasyland your proposed mechanism is by showing the genome of the initial population had only ONE gene for ribosomes?
So where did that starting population of one with only ONE gene for a ribosome grow into a population where some were “programmed for success” and others were not - apparently with access to several different variations of the ribosome gene?
Saying something doesn't indicate a mechanism. How were some “programmed for success” and how were others programmed for failure? What was the molecular difference between the majority of the population that died and the small part of the population that survived?