All Humans Are Mutants, Say Scientists 309
Hugh Pickens writes "In 1935, JBS Haldane, one of the founders of modern genetics, studied a group of men with the blood disease hemophilia and speculated that there would be about 150 new mutations in each human being. Now BBC reports that scientists have used next generation sequencing technology to produce a far more direct and reliable estimate of the number of mutations by looking at thousands of genes belonging to two Chinese men who are distantly related, having shared a common ancestor who was born in 1805. To establish the rate of mutation, the team examined an area of the Y chromosome which is unique because, apart from rare mutations, the Y chromosome is passed unchanged from father to son so mutations accumulate slowly over the generations. Despite many generations of separation, researchers found only 12 differences among all the DNA letters examined. The two Y chromosomes were still identical at 10,149,073 of the 10,149,085 letters examined."
Article title seems stupid to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Given what we know about biology, every living thing, including viruses, are mutants (or at least descendants of mutants).
The article title has to be one of the more braindead ones I've seen here on Slashdot, and I've been around for a while. (And somehow I don't understand how it's connected with the information in the summary.)
OTOH, I'm real tired....
Re:Um... statistically significant? (Score:3, Insightful)
No. You don't. The certainty of the inference is just low. This is a fine start, and new data will be added as genetic sequencing becomes cheaper.
Re:Article title seems stupid to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Um... statistically significant? (Score:3, Insightful)
Forgive me if I'm wrong. I'm fairly sure I have at least a basic grasp of the idea of statistical sampling, as used to infer the traits of a large population using a smaller representative sample from that population. But don't you still need a sample size bigger than two to make inferences about all of humanity?
The statistics are in the number of base pairs and the amount of time since common ancestor, not the number of people. So we know that in that lineage, mutations occur at a given rate which I'm too lazy to calculate.
Re:Um... statistically significant? (Score:3, Insightful)
And that is why you only have a basic grasp of statistical sampling as it is practised in the modern world.
Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Even if it was ammo, would you really listen to someone who believed that humans were formed from dust or a clot of blood and continue to believe the parlor tricks of old mystical texts?
Say anything you want to support the ID crowd, but the only argument they have is faith. Faith is meaningless for science.
When it comes down to it, the most faithful do not go to see their priest if their baby is sick. They take it to a doctor, because science and medicine work, and no matter how much they want to deny it, faith does not.
Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
We've already taken control of our own evolution, for better or worse:
Does anyone else see the conflict of interest inherent in that statement? This is what we humans do: we change the system before we even understand it. We try to "cure" autism before we even grasp its genetic or evolutionary significance.
We won't ever be able to get an accurate answer to this question: we've already been busy contaminating the evidence. We worry about seeding Mars or other planets with terrestrial microbes before we get a chance to conclusively rule out independent signs of life, but we think nothing of poisoning our own genetic well before we even understand what's down there and why.
"Despite many generations of separation" (Score:4, Insightful)
7-10 generations isn't that many...
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
Depends on who you ask... Some of the "most faithful" let their baby die a slow painful death while they pray, dance with a rattlesnake and babble incoherently.
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
They take it to a doctor, because science and medicine work
This is still having faith in the ability of the doctor. We need to use more discriminatory words than "faith", I think.
Re:Um... statistically significant? (Score:2, Insightful)
Every sample has the same ontological status as the last one. Data sets are bigger and richer than each other, not "more accurate" (assuming it was collected "correctly").
A single sample can be enough to discredit a scientific theory. A single sample is the start of a scientific theory, which can be added to, and modified as data is added to its underlying base. The processes by which this are done is called "statistics" and "science".
Re:Article title seems stupid to me (Score:2, Insightful)
nobody would waste...perfectly good grad students ...
Welcome to grad school, you must be new here.
Ever-appropriate captcha: "celled"
Article IS stupid: N = 1?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Both links, including the story on the Sanger institute's own page, suggest that this team studied only one set of relatives. I realize this is a lot of work and there aren't many people who would make good test subjects, that you knew were distant relatives. But I can't get over the idea of testing exactly one pair and making sound conclusions from it. Seems like they're assuming those 12 mutations were gradually accrued. Maybe the actual rate of mutation is much lower, except for Grandpa Li who wore a uranium codpiece every day and 10 of the mutations occoured then.
My point is determining the number of mutations between two people is impressive biology, but saying that's a universal constant is overstating it.
Re:Error rates (Score:3, Insightful)
That might be relevant if there wasn't error correction in DNA copying as well. The DNA success is with error correction.
The flaw in his idea is that hard drives don't make it 25yrs. He data would never make it to the copy process. But then, our DNA is copied far more often than every 25 years as well, it copied thousands of times a day. So maybe the real comparison would be copying the data from his raid back and forth thousands of times a day for 25 years.
Re:Weird Headline (Score:3, Insightful)
> 4TB hard drive once every 25 years (generation time) onto a brand new drive
Nope. Literally, its copying Y Chromosome data over and over trillions of times in sperm cells, one of which is then chosen at random for propagation to the next generation, where this process repeats.
Try that with your 4 TB RAID setup. :)
Re:Weird Headline (Score:3, Insightful)
We already do - that's why optical media typically incorporates ECC of some kind. We can't write data at those densities without some loss, which we need to correct for (and we do so in a way that is definitely more efficient than is used for DNA).
The only advantage DNA really has is storage density. We definitely don't get to the level of 2 bits per 600 hydrogen atoms worth of mass.