Isn’t the cell just a smaller demonstration of complexity with in the whole? I.e. one cannot pull the piston out of a running engine without failure of the whole?
Perhaps you wish to pretend that that was a reply to my post. If so, be aware that you will not convince anyone.
The human genome has about 3.2 billion sites (base pairs), so doing the multiplication we find that the number of mutations that can be expected in every newborn is about 35.
As compared with its parent at the same stage in the lifecycle.
But there are plenty of cell divisions between those two points. If there was just one you'd have a point, also you'd be a bacterium.
Quite so. And all the papers I can find on rates of somatic mutation put it much lower than Percy does.
But even given the right figures, Percy would have a point about cancer. Although the mutation rate is lower than he evidently thinks, the number of cell divisions is sufficiently high that if all or even most somatic mutations caused cancer we'd all be dead.