Clear the Mud

Note: the intro to what it is I think I am doing is here.
Please read that first, so you can get the context of where I'm coming from.


1. You are a mutant.

Yup. You're a mutant.

This is in response to the following claim that is often made:

All mutations are bad. They cause horrific birth defects. There is no way a mutant can survive, nor can anything good come of mutations.

It's usually a claim made to "prove" evolution is false.

Of course, this one is so factually wrong that it's kind of a joke.

In fact, it's so astonishingly wrong, that it can really only be called a lie.

Why?


Because, you are a mutant.

I know I already said that, but I'm just reinforcing the point.

You are a mutant and you can not deny it. Well, not if your honest.

And by the way, I don’t mean that half of your DNA came from mom and the other half from dad and so, therefore, you are different from them. That’s true, too. But I don’t mean that.

Keep reading...


I mean that you are, from the very beginning of your genetic existence, the result of mutations.


Here’s a bit of what I mean - just a little bit. For starters, if your Dad compared the DNA – the instructions of life - that were in any of his sperm cells (please be adults here) and compared it with the DNA that he was first given at conception he would find, as you might expect, that they are a nearly perfect match.

Nearly.

But not quite.

What he would find is compared with the DNA he had at the beginning of his life, the DNA in any sperm cell contain a couple of hundred simple mutations. This is a consistently demonstrable fact, a consequence of the slight imperfection of the machinery that copies our DNA.

So, his sperm contain numerous mutations.

And his sperm, with those mutations, along with your mother's egg, also with some mutations, made you.

So - without question – you are a mutant.

And to be clear, me too.

And pretty much every other living thing on Earth.


How so?


Your instructions were copied less-than-perfectly

To think about this, let me just describe some background with a way too simple and utterly inaccurate analogy:

Your DNA is a book of instructions, written in a simple alphabet (as it is made of only 4 letters, unlike our 26 letter alphabet).

Now, this instruction book is sometimes described as a "blueprint" of your body. However, that’s a bit inaccurate.

All your book really contains is the diagrams to make a wide variety of tools and materials that are, generically, called “proteins”.

And it’s these proteins, each one described in your DNA instruction book, that work together in an amazing dance of combinations and permutations to build you and every other organism on Earth.

So, again:

• DNA is the instructions, written in a simple alphabet, that says how to build proteins.
• Proteins are the things that actually go about building you.

OK... given that background, what is a mutation?

The most basic description of a mutation is: any change somewhere in the DNA instructions.

There are many types of changes that can happen, some massive and some almost imperceptible, but I’ll focus on the simpler ones.

Imagine someone has your book of DNA instructions and is given the task of making a copy of the whole thing by hand. (And in fact, this copying happens all the time in most of the cells in your body.)

OK, so, the guy who’s doing the copying is pretty darn good. He rarely makes mistakes and he’s also very diligent at double checking his work so as to correct the occasional error he does make.

So the copy is really, really pretty darn faithful to the original.

But… it’s a big book. Once in a very, very long while, the copying guy misspells a word (In the analogy, say, “cat” is copied as “car” or “kat”) and also happens to not notice the error, so it doesn’t get corrected.

Once he’s moved on to later pages of the book, there is no going back. The error is now a permanent part of the copied book.

That’s a mutation.

Other times, he might accidentally delete or add one or many letters. (In the analogy, “color” becomes “collor” or “colour”)

These are also mutations.

There are even more elaborate ways that changes in DNA instructions happen, but these basic ones illustrate the point, I think.

And these things happen often enough that by the time a dad’s sperm and a mom’s egg are created, and then they meet to ultimately lead to a new life, there’s already a hundred or so mutations locked in to the baby-to-be.

Every baby starts off with around 100 simple mutations.

Every baby is a mutant.

You are a mutant.

And yet most of us are not particularly unusual compared with anyone else, to the best of our knowledge.

Why?

(I originally ended with "Why?" to mean I would go into more detail in the next post. Alternatively, though, you can feel free to offer up thoughts on that very question.)
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Working topics for subsequent posts (Just so I have it down in print. And so people can say, "hey you never wrote that one!"):

• Quiet accumulations
• We are the things that worked
• The tiny difference between life and death
• The confusion of language: "The theory"
• The confusion of language: "The fittest"
• There's always something new
• You think living is easy? (The Second Law of overlooking the obvious)
• ...?