From Newsgroup: talk.origins
On 06/09/2025 05:12, Pro Plyd wrote:
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-mutations-evolution-genome-random.html
A study published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences by scientists from Israel and
Ghana shows that an evolutionarily significant
mutation in the human APOL1 gene arises not randomly
but more frequently where it is needed to prevent
disease, fundamentally challenging the notion that
evolution is driven by random mutations and tying
the results to a new theory that, for the first time,
offers a new concept for how mutations arise.
...
The possibility of a mutation occurring can in principle depend on the haplotype context. So if this a real effect, and not a statistical
fluke, this could be a case of preadaptation. It is also conceivable
that back mutation could have the effect of raising the frequency of the relevant haplotype in the non-mutant population after the event, though
my intuition is that this effect would be too small to be detected.
The possibility of a mutation occurring can also in principle depends on
the alleles of DNA repair and polymerase enzymes present. This also
raises the possibility of pre-adaptation. As those enzymes and the
substrate are more or less independently assorting any hitchhiking
effect can be expected to be small, though my intuition says that the
effect is larger than for the haplotype mechanism. (There are fewer generations of hitchhiking, but the independent assortment gets it into
the non-mutant population more effectively; I suspect that the latter dominates.)
--
alias Ernest Major
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