This is a fascinating niche of evolutionary biology that I have worked in for a while. The short answer is that yes, as far as we can tell all organisms evolve increasingly more efficient replication machinery, however at some point the strength of selection is no longer powerful enough to overcome the strength of genetic drift and some degree of error rate persists. As far as we can tell it seems like population size governs where this balance ends up such that small populations have high mutation rates and large populations have reduced mutation rates. Michael Lynch coined the term drift barrier hypothesis to describe this phenomenon. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23077252/

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ajuc 5 days ago | parent [-]

If the organism is too efficient at preventing mutations - it would evolve slower, right?

	▲	mfld 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, but note the mutation rate of germline cells - that are passed to your offspring and hence influence evolution - is estimated to be two orders of magnitude lower than other (somatic) cells.
	▲	gavinrees 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not necessarily if it had recombination (as in sexual reproduction), but as far as I understand, yes, you’d probably get fewer novel alleles/coding sequences of DNA generated per organism replication