Life Creates with Mistakes

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Life Creates with Mistakes

• Accidents Ensure Novelty

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Accidents Ensure Novelty

• When individual cells reproduce they first make a
  copy of the information they carry in their DNA.
• Usually this copy is exact so that the
  information is transmitted perfectly to the next
  generation.
• But, every so often, cellular mechanisms make
  errors in nucleotide sequences sometimes by
  only a tiny bit.

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Accidents Ensure Novelty

• Miscopying even a single nucleotide in a gene
  like dialing a single wrong digit in a phone
  number alters the gene sequence and therefore
  changes the piece of information being
  transmitted.
• The altered information may have no effect or may
  show up in the offspring as a defect.

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Accidents Ensure Novelty

• But, every once in awhile, it shows up as an
  improvement something that makes the offspring
  better adapted for survival than its parents.

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Wrinkle in Time
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The weakest of These
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Are They Weak Here?
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Tundra