Mutation is not Evolution | EvolutionExamples
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- Опубліковано 15 жов 2024
- This video explains the difference between evolution and mutation, and why it's a bad idea to confuse the two concepts.
The terms mutate and evolve are sometimes used interchangeably when people talk about biological change over time.
But mutation and evolution are two completely distinct processes. Mutations happen in single cells.
Most mutations only persist for a short time, as a tumor or growth arising from a single cell in a single individual.
Mutations only persist long-term if that cell is a gamete that forms a new individual.
We call the offspring that inherits a new mutation "a mutant", but it may be the start of something bigger.
The word evolution is used to describe the long-term changes in a population of many individuals, over the long-term.
Mutations are important because they're where new alleles or loci come from, but they always start in just one cell and one mutant.
Mutation doesn't drive evolution, it just provides the new ocassional new gene that may, or may not, go on to evolve.
Most importantly, individuals don't mutate together in parallel. Mutations are random, rare, and mostly unique
New mutations only become common via the generations of survival and reproduction in the descendants of that first mutant.
Our thinking is highly influenced by the words we use, and using the wrong words makes us think incorrectly.
If we use the term "mutate" when describing evolution, we may incorrectly think that a bunch of parallel mutations happened.
But that's not how mutation and evolution work. Mutation fuels evolution, but it isn't evolution.
Individuals may mutate, but populations evolve.
#evolution #mutation #EvolutionExamples
Music: The Goon's Loose by Nathan Moore (courtesy UA-cam music)
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that’s not what Professor Charles Xavier said 🗣️🗣️🔥💯💯🙏⁉️⁉️⁉️
Thank you for this. The part that I have difficulty understanding is that, mutations seem somewhat rare, a mutation that happens to be in a gamete seems like it will happen very seldom, a mutation that happens in a gamete, and produces an advantage, seems like it will almost never happen, and a mutation that happens in a gamete and produces an advantage and then that organism doesn't get killed just due to bad luck before it can reproduce, seems like it should happen almost never. Are there other sources of new genes other than mutation? Are there other "fuels" for evolution other than new genes? Or are mutations just a lot more common that I'm assuming? Thank you.
Mutations are the only "fuel" for evolution, but there are many different kinds (e.g., change of nucleotide, duplications of a length of DNA, etc.). They are extremely rare for any given location, but the genome is huge, populations are often quite large, and this has been going on for millions of years = lots of fuel.
As you correctly note, most new mutations are lost due to random chances, but there are lots of mutations happening all the time.
@@pleiotropy Thank you for the response. The different kinds of mutations is interesting I'll look into that. I'm going to follow up with more questions but feel no obligation to reply if you busy.
1) The "millions of years" factor, my understanding is that the reason why most big changes take millions of years is not because evolution is slow but because the environment usually changes slowly, but that when there is a sudden change in an environment then many species can undergo a large number massive changes often in only a few dozen generations. So like, when trying to understand how evolution is able to move so quickly, I think it's a bit besides the point to say millions of years = lots of fuel since even in tens of years there appears to still be more than enough fuel if that fuel is actually needed. So I'm still thinking there must be a hell of a lot of mutations for that sort of thing to be possible?
2) Do we have any idea of quantity here? So like, for example, in lets say a dog:
(a) what order of magnitude of mutations are you getting in the dog in its life overall and
(b) what percentage of those are in the gametes and
Like are we talking dozens? Hundreds? Millions? Billions?
And what sort of tradeoff is there with cancer? Is it more fuel = more cancer always? Or can you have relatively large number of mutations without disproportionately large amount of cancer?
Thank you again really appreciate it.
What’s a gamete ?
I’ve literally never heard them used as synonyms
Somewhat rare by working scientists, but here's a website by Pfizer which essentially uses mutate as a synonym for evolve.
www.pfizer.com/news/articles/how_do_viruses_mutate_and_what_it_means_for_a_vaccine
Good information here. Commenting for engagement and hopefully a boost from the almighty algorithm.
I appreciate that :)
😢 🙂