All Humans Are Mutants, Say Scientists

Hugh Pickens writes "In 1935, JBS Haldane, one of the founders of modern genetics, studied a group of men with the blood disease hemophilia and speculated that there would be about 150 new mutations in each human being. Now BBC reports that scientists have used next generation sequencing technology to produce a far more direct and reliable estimate of the number of mutations by looking at thousands of genes belonging to two Chinese men who are distantly related, having shared a common ancestor who was born in 1805. To establish the rate of mutation, the team examined an area of the Y chromosome which is unique because, apart from rare mutations, the Y chromosome is passed unchanged from father to son so mutations accumulate slowly over the generations. Despite many generations of separation, researchers found only 12 differences among all the DNA letters examined. The two Y chromosomes were still identical at 10,149,073 of the 10,149,085 letters examined."

Comments

Re:Article title seems stupid to me

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd suspect that the actual paper is probably more interesting in some way, nobody would waste time, money, and perfectly good grad students to determine that mutation does, in fact, occur in humans. Quantification of mutation rates, examination of which regions mutate quickly and which are highly conserved, and the like are all legitimate and nonobvious.

Probably just didn't survive a collision with the pop-science filter very well...

Re:so females evolve faster?

[gurps_npc]

No. You forget that men get an X also. And they don't get a back up, so any mutation in the X is more likely to show up in men.

In other words, the X evolves faster than the Y, and as men only get one X, anything on a single X becomes FAR more important to the men then it is to the women. It is only things that are on BOTH X chromosomes that are important to women.