#mutations

Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria’s effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What’s more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so. ↗

— Michael J. Behe

#chance #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution #macroevolution

Language thus becomes monumental because of the mutations of advertising. ↗

— Robert Smithson

#because #becomes #language #monumental #mutations

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#borges #counterbook #imaginable-permutations #orbis-tertius #tlön

This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map. ↗

— Francis Crick

#affecting #amino #amino acid #been #especially

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive. ↗

— Lionel Trilling

#aware #been #culture #function #high

A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here. ↗

— Francis Crick

#amino #amino acid #detailed #discussed #final

I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway. ↗

— James Lovelock

#always #any #anyway #engineering #genetic

First of all, many human diseases are influenced by, if not caused by mutations in genes. ↗

— Daniel Nathans

#diseases #first #first of all #genes #human

Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations of time. ↗

— Bertrand Russell

#ask #comes #freedom #goods #life