Acertain bcd-to-decimal decoder has four input lines and 10 output lines. if four input lines are capable of 16 possible combinations and only 10 output combinations are required, why have four inputs?

the answer is; biodiversity resulting from few ancestors

adaptive radiation occurs when a population is subjected to a large natural environment with spatial ecological variations. the parts of the population in the different ecologies begin to adapt to their local environments. due to non-random mating across the large populations, this causes the different populations from the large population to speciate within their local environments. they, therefore, diverge to different species sharing a common ancestor.