Imagine no mutation.

Imagine no mutation.
I wonder if you can.
No means for new variation.
A creationist's view of Man.
Imagine all the people
learning it this way.

Boo-hoo, ewww.

I found out this semester that although most of my students in "Human Origins" had learned about natural selection, that relatively few of them had learned about mutation. 

Huh? Are people still stuck on Darwin? Apparently. 

Mutation requires a little bit of genetics to understand, but c'mon! Natural selection makes no sense without it. None.

And what's more, natural selection cannot be the all-powerful force that popular culture might have us believe when mutation is accounted for. Evolution is so much more fascinating with even a basic understanding of mutation. In this molecular-clock, whole-genome-sequencing era, how can anyone teaching and learning evolution not have at least a basic understanding of chance, perpetual accumulation of mutations?

We've all, each and every one of us, got many de novo mutations. So our genomes are distinct from our parents' and siblings', not just because of genetic recombination of our grandparents' genomes when our parents' eggs and sperms were built, but because of unique mutations that occurred while making those germ cells or in the early stages after their union.

That this constant change in lineages is occurring with each reproductive event is proof that natural selection is a largely tolerant process, perpetually allowing perpetual evolution by mutation.

(And, maybe natural selection has much less, and mutation has much more, to do with speciation than many have assumed.)

What happens to each and every one of our unique mutations, whether or not they live on in our offspring, whether or not they play a role in adaptation, depends on quite a bit of luck, partly because of the "Law of Segregation":

A Mutation's Future
Click to enlarge. Email me for original file that you can modify: holly_dunsworth@uri.edu

For a description of evolution that incorporates perpetual mutation, check out "Evolution is the only natural explanation. And it's all we need."