I bet no one thought those two topics would be discussed in the place at the same time, ever. Certainly never occurred to me. But Jonathan Jarret at
A Corner of Tenth Century Europe points to this site at
http://www.bioc.cam.ac.uk/uto/howe.html that does just that. The point of the article seems to be to point out that scribal errors down a manuscript stemma show a remarkable similarity to mutations down a DNA string over time. Interesting, but who knows what it means.
The problem of course is that it assumes that the more copies a text goes through the more scribal error there will be. But that isn't the case. Part of the problem in textual criticism is that such assumptions are easily proven false, and one part of the stemma may indeed be very pure, even centuries and multiple copies removed from the the original, while another copy only one copy removed from the original may be rife with errors. In fact, this is just the problem I'm facing right now: I have a mnauscript very close to Aelfric's lifetime that contains many errors, another that is 2 centuries later, and other than updating the orthography into late 12th, early 13th century orthography (the ge- prefix on verb forms in OE becomes an i- prefix for example), is remarkably free of scribal error even though there is active editing of the text (leaving out portions on purpose). That is, the later manuscript, which displays activity that should add a layer of opportunities and situations that give rise to scribal errors is surprisingly free from such errors whereas a manuscript that is supposedly a straight copy and is close to the original has many scribal errors. So far as I know, such an example is not something duplicated in DNA, but I could be wrong, and undoubtedly will be corrected.
