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Asked by mrkinead to David, Luna, Mark, Melanie, Probash on 16 Mar 2011 in Categories: General.
Question: if evolution was just mutations how come mutations in humans now lead to disabilities
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Mark Vesey answered on 16 Mar 2011:
Many mutations affect life in a negative way, there are only a few very very rare that improve or give advantage to a species. Though the mutations that lead to an “improvement” are rare they give the affected lifeform an advantage making them more likely to survive and reproduce. The offspring are then likely to also have the “improvement”, lifeforms without the “improvement” are less likely to survive and reproduce. This is “survival of the fittest” and eventually the species will all have the “improvement” mutation. This process will then repeat and evolution of the species takes place. These “improvement” mutations are so rare that timescales for evolution can be measured in millions of years and a human lifetime is insignificant to this time period – meaning we only really see mutations leading to negative consequences.
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Luna Munoz answered on 16 Mar 2011:
Well, mutations don’t happen with a purpose. Some will end up as an adaptation and some as a disability. It would be good if more and more people are born with no wisdom teeth – mine were a pain, and I had them all taken out at once!
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Melanie Stefan answered on 16 Mar 2011:
Mutations happen randomly. Often they will lead to disabilities (and have always done so). But in some rare cases, they have the opposite effect: The mutation does something that improves the individual’s chances of surviving and of having offspring. For instance, a mutation might make someone more resistant against a certain disease. Sometimes whether or not a mutation is useful depends on the environment. Why evolution has worked out in the end (despite the fact that beneficial mutations are quite rare events) is because it has had plenty of time to work.
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David Pyle answered on 16 Mar 2011:
In evolutionary theory, mutations will happen randomly all the time. Some of these mutations might be useful (for a particular organism in a particular environment), while others might not be.
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mohammedchristsenior commented on :
Hello,this is my second post.
From what I can gather, pseudogenes are characterized by neutral mutations. So for example, with a duplication pseudogene or a retropseudogene, there are two copies of a gene where only one copy is needed for functionality; thus, the second gene is free to mutate without negatively affecting fitness. Proof for evolution can be seen in making a comparison between the pseudogene mutations in humans and the pseudogene mutations in other primates–since it is all but impossible for these neutral mutations to have occurred, independently, in the exact same spots on the pseudogene’s DNA sequence. Furthermore, pseudogenes can help us establish taxonomy, since the closer the match between two species, the more recently did they branch off from their common ancestor (pseudogene comparisons have been a part of the convergent genetic evidence showing that humans and chimps are more closely related to each other than either of them is to gorillas). This is my understanding, but correct me if anything I’ve said is mistaken.
My question then, if I am correct in thinking that mutations to pseudogenes are considered examples of neutral mutations, is: Why are the same pseudogenes found throughout an entire species? Why do all humans have the same mutations in the same spots on the same pseudogenes–or, hell, why do we even have the same duplicated genes in the first place? If this whole process–gene duplication, followed by mutations rendering one of the two genes into a nonfunctional pseudogene–does not affect fitness, then why would we expect to see everyone showing the same pseudogenes with the same mutations on them? Wouldn’t only certain lineages have them? And I’m not talking about ‘race’ here – I’m talking about possibly even something more specific, like just a single family or something. Blue-eye and brown-eye alleles BOTH still exist, because neither one is more ‘fit’ than the other, so there is no reason for either of them to be extinguished over time. Why doesn’t the same thing apply to pseudogenes and the mutations that occur on them?
I should add one more thing: I can fully understand why unitary (‘disabled’) pseudogenes might exist throughout the entire population. For one thing, it is simply more metabolically efficient not to carry a gene that expends energy creating proteins which we no longer need (such as the GULO gene in primates, which is disabled because we have always had sufficient Vitamin C in our diet, or the gene that once made eyesight possible in the now-vestigial eyeballs of moles who no longer have any need for vision). But it’s the retropseudogenes and duplication pseudogenes that really confuse me – I can’t imagine how they would affect fitness in any way, and if they don’t, then I can’t imagine why they’d exist throughout entire populations, much less entire species.
This was way longer than I intended it to be, but hopefully it was at least clear.
But if mutations on pseudogenes are selectively neutral – neither favored nor disfavored – then why do we see the same set of mutations in the entire human species and the same mutations in the entire chimpanzee species, rather than only in certain human lineages and in certain chimpanzee lineages? If natural selection is not at work, what is the mechanism that would have caused this mutation to be widespread throughout an entire population of early humans or an entire population of early chimps?
Note: I am a bacteriologist, so not familiar with human genome content. Or chimp for that matter.
If I understand you, you fail to see why some pseudo genes are found throughout each species with the same mutations while you would expect them to have slowly diverged within the species by accumulation of neutral mutations.
The only guess I could make is that the insertion of the pseudogenes happened early enough that they got in all the species. from what I understand from human evolution, it is probable that some serious bottlenecks have happened at the beginning and that may explain why we share so many of those pseudogenes.
Then for the mutations in those and the addition of new pseudogenes, it does depends on the rate of creation of pseudogenes (quite low I guess) and of mutations (probably a little bit higher than that of pseudogene creation, I guess). If we take that no pseudogenes were integrated in our species genome since the divergence from the chimp) what we would see is that we share those genes, with a different set of mutations which would directly depends on our genetic history. Then again some migration patterns will have induced serious bottlenecks which would have heavily influenced the outcome that would be observed now.
And that is where I am at a loss in my ignorance of the human genome. Is that what we observe, or do you say that some how those genes have been stable and no mutations accumulated since?
spotcam11 commented on :
This has moved me emotionally thank you mohammed 🙂