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The Average Human Has 60 New Genetic Mutations
mcgrew pointed out a story about a new study that found the average person is born with 60 genetic mutations, very few of which involve weather manipulation or an amazing healing factor. This number was less than expected, leading the researchers to believe human evolution happens more slowly than previously thought. From the article: "Sixty mutations may sound like a lot, but according to the international team of geneticists behind the new research, it is actually fewer than expected. 'We had previously estimated that parents would contribute an average of 100 to 200 mistakes to their child,' Philip Awadalla, a geneticist at the University of Montreal who co-led the project, said in a press release. 'Our genetic study, the first of its kind, shows that actually much fewer mistakes, or mutations, are made.'
...before a little girl passes through a wall at the federal reserve!
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Mutations, smutations! Everyone knows that evolution is bunk and that humans were created in their current, perfect form just 6000 years ago.
That's a very groovy mutation.
I would have thought that a geneticist would realize that mutations aren't necessarily mistakes and are key to adaptations and evolution.
I know this is probably going to go down in flames, but exactly how do creationists deal with this sort of finding? Answers from actual creationists preferred...
My intuition tells me they're missing something. I've always felt that mutation rates among stressed organisms would be a lot higher than among healthy sucessful organisms. Again, intuitively, not scientifically, from a "selfish gene" perspective, an organism that generated more mutations in its offspring when it wasn't doing well would be more likely to have ANY of its genes passed on to future generations, while an organism doing well would mutate less.
From a simpler perspective: more viruses, more bacteria, more cell damage all make mutations of some kind more likely as well. Mutations are copy-errors, and a cell under stress would be less able to error-correct its genes.
None of this has a hypothesis I'd be willing to put out, but I think studying first world humans misses some possible independent variables.
of course, i'm not educated in the field, but if parent's dna were copied exactly the same, then you wouldn't be much different from your brothers and sisters.
Seems like it's evolution, not mutation.
Be seeing you...
'We had previously estimated that parents would contribute an average of 100 to 200 mistakes to their child,'
My parents contributed 1000s of mistakes to me...
What I recall from other sources is that the % of human blastocysts that naturally fail to develop is relatively high. A bit of googling should provide the details. This means that there's a filtering effect taking place, possibly as the result of previous rapid change reducing the elasticity.
... the mistake is you!
In terms of a DNA sequence making an exact copy of itself, yes they are mistakes (that is the very definition of a mutation). Whether that mistake turns out to be beneficial to the organism or not is a separate issue.
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Mutations are not responsible for man's emergence-- see "On the Mystery of Innovation" on Amazon
If you do a similar comparison to computer coding, your argument is similar to saying that a mature, stable program needs less patches (mutations) and bug fixing to work, while a less mature products will require more patches. However, even for stable programs, that do their thing well, there is always space for subtle improvements (a refined interface, a new feature, support for new architectures). I think the same applies for living organism. Your definition of healthiness may not necessarily include the subtle mutations that further improve on the original. For example, again just as in computer coding, as hardware evolves, you won't need to support old and unused hardware features, and so you remove it. The same for evolved organisms: that's probably why we lost the tail and most of our fur. On the other hand, the needs of the current world to multitask and new uses for hands and brains dictated by technology, may be also influence the mutations that take place. 60 mutations isn't all that much, after all.
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"Sixty mutations may sound like a lot, but according to the international team of geneticists behind the new research, it is actually fewer than expected. 'We had previously estimated that parents would contribute an average of 100 to 200 mistakes to their child"
Don't worry, most parents are going out of their way to make up the difference and then surpass it.
I think it's woefully premature to generalize the results of this study to the entirety of humanity. These results are based off of the whole genome sequencing of *2* families, and as far as our technology and analytical methods have come, they still leave a lot to be desired. Besides, the key message isn't that we have a conclusive de novo mutation rate for humans (which we don't), but that the rate and mechanism of their creation can vary widely from family to family.
To mis-quote Walt Kelley
I'd imagine, if natural selection holds true, and I'd like to believe it does, that mutation frequency is variable with external environmental stressors. Adaptation breeds change, or something like that.
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Most of these mutations are in "junk", or non-coding DNA. Almost all novel mutations to functional DNA are detrimental.
At Skepticon 3, PZ Myers gave an excellent presentation about genetic mutation and adaptation. It's about an hour long, but definitely worth a watch.
If we are evolving slower than expected than somone must have altered our genetic code to speed up our evolution. Maybe aliens? We haven't really seen evidence of gradual human evolution, there is still a gap where our brains grew enormously in a short period.
...mistakes make you! ...as, indeed, they do everywhere else...
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Genetic algorithms themselves rely on mutations for success, do they not. It's what shakes things up and allows the algorithm to work.
The elites of the world formulate breeding, and so of course from their perspective, most of us plebians are 'mistakes' but many great minds in Science and Art come from mutations. All I would ask elites to do is consider how genetic algorithms work and make analogies with biological genetics.
Some smart ass can just say that computational genetic algorithms have nothing to do with biological genetics, but that's not true. Mutations are very useful. They're everywhere in nature. The universe has mutations. Let's not have an X-men war if we don't already.
Anyway, talking to myself helps me sleep at night. Leave me alone!
I wonder if the rate of mutations is higher or lower than in the past, and what it's trending.
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hijacking first thread to link the source (subscription/university login req'd), since the posted article doesn't.
that OLD LADY already cleaned it out
I don't think that analogy to software development is aproparate here. A programmer who writes patches intentionally corrects or alters the code in an effort to gain a certain outcome, country to how evolution is believed to work.
Non-genetically speaking, I'm sure the number will be much higher over the kids lifetime, and I'm sure those mistakes will be far more problematic. Hopefully, mistake #1 wasn't forgetting the birth control...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
There was a recent call for the Treasury to audit the gold storage at Ft Knox. The treasury doesn't want to go along with the request.
'We had previously estimated that parents would contribute an average of 100 to 200 mistakes to their child,'
My parents contributed far more than 200 mistakes to this child... =)
Could there be some attrition bias here? Maybe the average number of mutations is actually higher, but those with more mutations are more likely to miscarry or die in childhood?
Parent Mod down?
TFA is, unfortunately, very brief and doesn't talk about this distinction but not all conceptions result in births. Embryos are often reabsorbed without the mother even being aware. I would expect the number of mutations at birth to be lower than the number at conception because those with more and more serious mutations are never born.
Compare this of urban to poor rural. You will find that poor rural will have a LOT more mutations and BIGGER. Why? More mosquitoes. The fact is that most mutations are caused by virus and most virus probably transmit via arthopod-bourne than any other reason.
Sadly, these guys probably looked at fairly well to do ppl who are not just not exposed, but not around a whole lot of ppl or animals. Once they are closer to life, they will have more, faster, and bigger mutations (as in whole genes being transfered).
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Quote: '... actually much fewer mistakes, or mutations, are made.'
This is a very wrong statement. Mutation is a basic natural process, a normal occurrence during reproduction. That's how DNA works! To call it a "mistake" is idiotic and implies some entity somehow "preferred" no mutation ever.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." -- Tennyson
You can thank irradiated food and cell phones for these figures. It would be more interesting to look at some fossilized remains and compare the rate of mutations from several centuries ago.
The only mutant powers I really want is the one from Philip K. Dick's "The Golden Man". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Man
Germ cells are the sperm and eggs which are pretty hardwired in sperm stem cells or ovaries by birth. The non-germ somatic cells which make up the vast majority of your body continue to mutate through your pre-birth development and post-birth life. Cancer is thought to be the accumulation of 5 to 20 such mutations or expression changes in somatic stem cells. This cancer hypothesis should be better known in next decade or two as researchers are furiously sequencing cancer cells to see how they have changed.
As a corollary to your intuition, Aphids (the garden pest) do adjust the genes they pass on depending on the circumstances they find themselves in. During the spring (low stress circumstances; many generations worth of feeding ahead), they reproduce asexually as a way to drastically increase the number of offspring they have. Yes, copy error rates aside, they're genetically identical. Later on in the year (winter's coming; high stress time due to a strongly selecting event), they switch to sexual reproduction which yields fewer offspring overall, but the offspring are genetically unique. In other words, the strategy switches from "get as many copies of my genes out there as quickly as possible" to "don't put all your eggs in a single basket."
No, this isn't quite the same as your hypothesis, just a variation on the same theme that high stress yields more novel genotypes.
I understand that country western music listeners have an average of 65 mutations...
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
I think where your analogy falls down is that all genetic mutations are coding errors, whether beneficial or not. It would be more like a computer bug caused by a typo in the programmer's code that made the program calculate faster. I don't, however, remember ever personally running across a bug like this in my own code...
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Note that my submission was completely changed; the only thing that stayed the same was the link.
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Sounds like the old theory of evolution might need a little timeline revision now.....
"found the average person is born with 60 genetic mutations, very few of which involve weather manipulation or an amazing healing factor"
So wait, people HAVE been found with these abilities? just not in large numbers? Oh wait, probably not, that's just slashdot misleading it's readers with it's summary's again.