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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."
I for one, welcome us all! :)
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...
I seem to remember them saying that the mutations come from the father, how women are mutants I don't know.
I have shocking news for you, you may want to have a seat: women have fathers, just like men. Disturbing, I know.
It's funny how you add "(I bike to work.)" as if that makes it less weird. :)
Now, the 204 year bit sounds impressive, but it isn't like a piece of DNA lasted 204 years without any decay. Instead it was copied repeatedly over that time. If I copied that 4TB hard drive once every 25 years (generation time) onto a brand new drive (assuming that you could keep making them compatible) I don't think that getting the data across 200 years without any bit-flips is really that tall of an order. Sure, technology will change, but that really is a different matter, and I doubt that any commodity computer technology used in the next 200 years will do any worse than what we have today.
Actually, it's more than copying the drive once every 25 years, it's making a copy of data on the drive many times each day -- some where around the 100,000th copy of the drive randomly choose a copy to keep and start the process over again. With that kind of usage on a drive, the failure rate (let alone error rate) will be _much_ higher.
That sound isn't whistling. What you are hearing is actually laughter distorted by the Doppler effect.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.