Mutations and their Origins

DNA, the blueprint of all living organisms (even for plants, right?), has the unique ability to make exact copies of itself. This is how a person keeps their same DNA throughout their lifetime, and it is these genes that they pass on to their children. Changes only occur in an individual through mutation. In fact, each and every characteristic of every organism became because of a mutation. There are other factors in evolution, including gene flow, natural selection, & genetic drift, but all these are simply results of mutations in large and separated populations. Mutations are random, and they happen when the DNA makes a “mistake” in it’s replication process.

So we, humans, as complex as we are, are the result of an organism which, in the process of replicating itself, randomly errored and made a small adjustment to its blueprint, added up over billions of years into the creatures that we are.

I’m not so much disputing it as, if it is true, exclaiming how incredible it seems.

Any thoughts?

What do you expect to be said? That is roughly the current theory, and can be demonstrated to some extent physically and mathematically. Unless you have a better one, or can disprove it, then…?

You have to think about it in a way of how it all started too. There is a certain threshold where if the origianal replicators wern’t making enough working copies of themselves due the number of erroneous copies they’d make they’d be out produced, and if you were too perfect you’d have too high demands/take too long to reproduce, hence the happy medium.

Also the ones that didn’t mutate, because of perfect replication, could never mutate into more adaptable organisms that could, for example, eat the other ones. SO non-mutating replicators would eventually start getting ‘eaten’ by the near perfect replicators, and the not near perfect replicators would get out produced.

You could probably do a nice mathematical formula to find the optimum mutation rate, which would probably turn out to be DNA’s mutation rate.

Mutation rate varies between organisms, dependent on their evolutionary history to some extent. It seems also quite likely that environmental stress supresses/overloads the mutation repair machinery and results in a higher observed rate of mutation/evolution. “Optimal rate” is dependent on circumstance…but nature usually gets it pretty close anyway.

I though the question was leading to a creationist argument about how fantastical the evolution argument seems…maybe it is.

:unamused: cookies.