Clear the Mud

The intro to this attempt at being a smarty-pants who knows less than he thinks is here.
Please read that first, so you can get the context of where I'm coming from.
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To recap:

• Everyone was born with mutations.
• Most of these mutations have little or no effect on your ability to live and flourish.

But, on occasion, a mutation makes a difference.

“Oh my GOD! It's a MUTANT!!!” ... well, no, it's probably something pretty un-amazing...

Deformations are the most obvious mutations to us.

Although, even then, many things that are technically “deformations” are nothing more than the minor variations that we all have when compared to others.

But some, of course, are serious – ones we usually call birth defects generally cause problems which decrease the likelihood of surviving to adulthood. Of this type, most are so severe that such a one would likely never even make it through pre-birth development and would not even be born.

These are the ones - aside from the ability to shoot ice from our hands or to look like Hugh Jackman - that people commonly think of as “mutations”.

But the rest... are a little more subtle.

Sometimes, a mutation makes a difference right when it emerges - if it affects something immediately important in how something physically develops or it's ability to continue living.

Other times, even though it changes something physically (whether you can see it or not), a mutation may not impact anything enough to effect an organism's development or life *if* it doesn't really impact the needs it has in that particular environment.


Relative benefit, relative harm

So, as for mutations that do have a noticeable effect.

Some cause harm, possibly minimal, possibly huge.

Some cause a benefit, possibly minimal, possibly huge.

AS an example, we can consider changes that affect an organism's ability to obtain or efficiently utilize food.

Some possible beneficial results of a mutation that increase the ability to obtain energy from food:

• Can outrun others to get food,
• Can forage better or root around for untapped food sources,
• Can eat items not commonly eaten or too harmful for most to eat,
• Can use strength as a tool to either kill animals easier or fight off competitors
• Can biologically extract more energy from less food (net result, you need less food to survive)

Some possible detrimental results of a mutation that decrease the ability to obtain energy from food:

• Slower, when speed is important for getting to the food
• Less ability to forage for food sources (anteater with a stumpy snout?)
• Less ability to tolerate food types, especially when those are the only foodstuffs available.
• Less physical strength when ability to take down an animal is critical or when competition for food is carried out by strength.
• Able to extract less energy from the same amount of food (net result, you need more food to survive).

(As a side-comment: notice that being "the strongest" is just one of many things that may - or may not - help an individual to survive. Some people, even today, insist on interpreting a famous term "Survival of the fittest" to mean some form of "Survival of the strongest". This is absolutely wrong.)

Now it’s important to note here - with this food acquisition example - that in times of plenty, there might be so much food available that everyone has enough to eat and there’s no particular harm or benefit to the above changes in ability, assuming they are not too severe.

In this case, where the pressure caused by food availability is very low, it's possible to have a population of animals with both the original food-using ability and the altered one to be intermingled without any noticeable advantage of one over the other. If the environment is not one in which this mutation is noticed, there is little pressure on the animals with the relatively decreased ability.

It’s when food becomes more scarce that any benefit or harm, food-wise, will become noticeable to the population.


Just able to make it through

Under this pressure of nature (ie, sudden limited food sources) the harm or benefit of any abilities will ultimately be noticed in one way:

Which ones are able to survive this pressure, and which ones are not.

Compared to those better equipped to cope with the pressure, more of those individuals that are less able to survive the pressure will succumb before they have children. And so the genetics that caused them to be less able to cope will diminish in the population over time.

Taken to the extreme, if the pressure (ie, lack of food) continues long enough, over enough generations, the genes which resulted in a lesser ability to cope could ultimately be gone from the population.

But note: all the survivors had was simply a better ability to deal with a particular circumstance over time. It could have been lack of food, it could have been too cold or too hot, or increased radiation, or a new disease, or anything else you can think of.

Usually it's many of these at once.

Nothing about an individual's survival, or more importantly, the genetics behind it, says anything about it's superiority or advanced nature.

That which allowed survival was simply the best thing available at the time.


Not more advanced, just the fortunate recipients of survival

To drive the point home, there have been uncountable numbers of species that - after all their "advancement" - suddenly ended up without even a "best". Given a particular challenge - some lasting numerous generations, others happening abruptly - most species on Earth, after millions of years getting through all sorts of things, one day found themselves with nothing that ultimately could save them.

So, in the end, the use of the term "good genetics" (a term I've heard tossed about) is something I find particularly annoying. That term is so vague that it is essentially meaningless. But the way people use it is to mean something like, "to be more advanced".

This is simply false.

On a purely biological level (as opposed to philosophical), the fact that we, each of us, is here on Earth means nothing more than that we (via all our ancestors) made it through the hoops and hurdles of time.

More likely than not, in many cases, we just made it.

We are all a mish-mash of thousands of things that were good enough for government work. Some functioned well, some even exceedingly well, and some just got us by. Some things got tweaked to work better, others still truck along almost the same as they were when they first appeared.

Nothing about us is, in any way, perfect. And biologically speaking, we are not in any way a goal of this process.

Biologically speaking, we are each, simply, an amazingly fascinating, walking, talking collage of things that worked.

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In the next post, I think I'll discuss a more extreme type of challenge to populations. Something more life-or-death extreme.