Great opening post, Faith!
You end with:
I hope it is possible to make a thread out of this stuff.
and ReverendDG replies with:
maybe, not sure
He's wrong of course. This thing has all the marks of a great thread, one way or another. Here's my little contribution:
Faith is trundling along behind a yellow lorry, driving home after a long day's debate about mutations. While thinking about all that has been said, she inadvertently takes a wrong turn. A bit further along, she realizes her mistake and turns the car, muttering at herself for being so absent-minded. A short while later, when she's on the right track again, traffic slows because of an accident ahead. Slowly moving past the site of the accident, she sees that the yellow lorry, the one she had been driving behind originally, has had to brake very hard for some reason. The car directly behind the lorry hasn't been able to brake soon enough and has run into it.
With a shock Faith realizes that if she hadn't made her mistake,
she might have been the one to run into that yellow lorry, instead of the other car. Where she first rebuked herself, she now thanks her luck - or more probably God - for the mistake she made. After all, it possibly saved her life.
Then she realizes another thing, namely that the mistake that saved her life is a metaphor for a beneficial mutation. At the moment she made her mistake, it was just that: a mistake. The context in which the mistake became a good thing did not exist yet. It's the same with mutations in DNA: at the moment they happen, they're just mistakes in the copying process. Whether they turn out to be beneficial mutations or not, depends for a large part on the context in which they manifest themselves. In one set of circumstances, a mutation may have consequences that are very different from the consequences of the same mutation in another set of circumstances. For example, your fur colour mutating from grey to white may be a good thing if your environment is a snowy landscape, but somewhere else you may stand out too much to be able to hide from predators.
Another important thing to realize is that whether you call a mutation a mistake or not, depends also on the level at which you are looking at it. At the level of the copying process, a mutation is definitely a mistake. But at the level of the molecular physico-chemistry, it's just the laws of nature that are being followed.
I know, it's wishful thinking: "Faith thinks this, Faith realizes that, ..."
Anyway, I hope it helps.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.
™ Version 4.2
