I didn't imagine that everything would change, but surely something had to come out different. So I went to him and asked what he meant by that. He told me that my protein-DNA reactions are a bit like flies and flypaper. If you hang a strip of flypaper in a room full of flies, some flies will stick, and it doesn't matter if the air in the room has a little extra oxygen or nitrogen in it, or if the temperature is warm or cool. The flies seek out the paper and land, usually for good.
Many proteins find their targets and stick regardless of the soup they are floating in.
While boiling tar might not work well as a medium for biological reactions, a few salt molecules more or less often won't make a difference. It makes sense when you think about it. These dauntless proteins have weathered the storms of evolution, carrying out their functions faithfully as species have transformed over eons from fish to lungfish, from dinosaur to bird, from trilobite to fruit fly. Proteins can't always count on finding themselves in precisely the same chemical soup generation after generation as organisms evolve. But those that perform regardless of small changes in the concentration of sodium have made it through millions of years of natural selection and are still encoded in the genes of living things today.