Quotes About Mutation

Every time somebody new gets the Ebola virus, it mutates.

I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain.

Our habits and our institutions, from language to cities, are constantly changing, and the mechanism of change turns out to be surprisingly Darwinian: it is gradual, undirected, mutational, inexorable, combinatorial, selective and in some vague sense progressive.

We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and it is simply impossible to feed information back into the recipe by changing the cake.

Mutation in the TP53 gene is almost the defining feature of a lethal cancer; in fifty-five per cent of all human cancers, TP53 is broken. The proportion rises to over ninety per cent among lung cancers. People born with one faulty version of TP53 out of the two they inherit, have a ninety-five per cent chance of getting cancer, and usually at an early age.

Only towards the edge of its range, on an isolated island, or in a remote valley or on a lonely hill top, does natural selection occasionally cause part of a species to morph into something different

Suppose, for instance, that a gene appeared on the X chromosome that specified the recipe for a lethal poison that killed only sperm carrying Y chromosomes. A man with such a gene would have no fewer children than another man. But he would have all daughters and no sons.

To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.

mutatis mutandis

As Lynn Margulis writes: "All the world's bacteria essentially have access to a single gene pool and hence to the adaptive mechanisms of the entire bacterial kingdom. The speed of recombination over that of mutation is superior: it could take eukaryotic organisms a million years to adjust to a change on a worldwide scale that bacteria can accommodate in a few years.

If mutation and error and serendipity unlock new doors in the biosphere's adjacent possible, exaptations help us explore the new possibilities that lurk behind those doors. A match you light to illuminate a darkened room turns out to have a completely different use when you open a doorway and discover a room with a pile of logs and a fireplace in it. A tool that helps you see in one context ends up helping you keep warm in another. That's the essence of exaptation.

when things change without a human agent directing the change, they are likely to change for the worse.

Algunos investigadores, como Richard Klein, atribuyen dicha revolución cultural a una mutación genética, la cual se habría producido hace unos 50.000 años, que mejoró la capacidad cognitiva en nuestra especie.

Heroes, lovers and believers don´t extinguish: they are rediscovered in every age, and in this sense myth always emerges. The situation in which we find ourselves resembles an interlude in which the curtain has fallen whilst a disconcerting mutation of the workers and accessories is taking place.

And it is this randomness of variation that is responsible for the enormous, often quite bizarre diversity of the living world.

Dutchman de Vries discovered that in the offspring even of thoroughly pure-bred stocks, a very small number of individuals, say two or three in tens of thousands, turn up with small but 'jump-like' changes, the expression 'jump-like' not meaning that the change is so very considerable, but that there is a discontinuity inasmuch as there are no intermediate forms between the unchanged and the few changed. De Vries called that a mutation.

generation III) do not affect the protein in the offspring, whereas changes in the DNA (bomb in generation V) affect the protein in all subsequent generations. Information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins (solid arrows), and possibly from RNA to DNA (dashed arrows), but never from protein to RNA or DNA.

What do cells do when they see a broken piece of DNA? Cells don't like such breaks. They'll do pretty much anything they can to fix things up. If a chromosome is broken, the cells will repair the break using an intact chromosome.

Anti-Semitism being what it is—a continuously mutating virus, an incurable form of madness

Strange Change B

genetic drift, and

My idea right from the beginning, I guess, was to dismantle the immune system one gene at a time so we could track the mutations that cause problems.

Every hundred feet the world changes

It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.