RE: [HAPS-L] Mutations

[Ken Saladin <ksaladin@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:26 AM 2/27/2007, you wrote:
> Ken-
> Is it surprising to you that measurable reality is different from ?what
> conventional wisdom says?? 

Not at all. I've discovered "conventional wisdom" in A&P to
be all-too-often erroneous in the course of 14 years of peer review of my
textbooks. The great thing about the review process is that there's so
often an expert in immunology or muscle physiology or something like that
who questions what all the textbooks have been saying for years and
years, and it prompts me to reconsider the "facts" and find
that they're often wrong.

I think the idea that most mutations must be harmful is a holdover from
the era before geneticists realized that so much of the DNA was
noncoding. The "conventional wisdom" is that the genome has
been fine-tuned by natural selection for millions of years, and a random
mutation is like throwing a monkey wrench into a piece of complex
machinery -- far more likely to damage something than to do any good, or
even to be harmless. That seems very intuitively sensible. The emergence
of the realization that only 2% of the DNA codes for proteins throws a
whole new light on this, but textbooks are painfully slow to catch up and
to discard old bromides, and so we still find many or most introductory
textbooks (general biology especially) saying most mutations are
deleterious.

Ken