Benefits of Blu Ray Replication
Many compact disc replication companies think that the Blue-ray disc is truly part of a new wave of technology that has taken over the entertainment and movie industries. Technologies such as HD-DVD…
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Mistakes are made during DNA replication. Is there any benefit to the mistakes for species?
Genetic diversity.
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Usually mutations are negative because evolution has been in progress for billions of years and has improved organism a lot. In some rare instances there are positive effects of a mutation, where the trait might be useful in current context.
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Mutations are how evolution occurs. If there were no "mistakes", as you call them, there would be no adaptability or improvement of any species.
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You can see how it is a benefit for viruses like HIV. HIV has a relative high rate of errors during replication. Thats why it can mutate so rapidly and evade vaccines and drugs.
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Yes, good answers. My favorite example in this branch of science is the one-eyed cat that was born a while ago. It died soon after birth because, essentially, the design was not favorable to the environment and its ultimate survival. In a stastical sense, in the world of probability, a mutation may occur which allows the organism to survive in its respective environment through the mechanisms of genetic diversity and natural selection.
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Well, first off I wouldn't really call them "mistakes", more like "mutations". These random mutations could actually lead to beneficial characteristics. This is how a species can evolve over time to adapt to the changing environment. For instance, a genetic mutation could give a bird a slightly different shaped beak that allows it to catch food easier. In this case, the bird, having a better chance of survival, can pass this gene onto the next generation.
Granted, not all mutations are beneficial. It's true that some can actually be detrimental to an organism (a fruit fly born without eyes, for instance). But in reality, most mutations are harmless, and don't effect the organism at all.
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Yeah. Some of them lead to adaptions to their environment I think. Also, the disease sickle cell anemia, although it is a chronic disease, also gives a resistance to malaria when you have it.
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As you are referring to species, I'm assuming that you mean micro-mutation changes which may happen over single lifetimes, as opposed to the large changes which take thousands & thousands of years (I'm hearing alot of talk of evolution here, which is nonsense on the micro-mutation scale of things to the level where we're talking about one miscoded strand of DNA), when enough mutations occur the species in question is not the same species as the one prior. The new species fits a slightly different niche to the ancestor, as the mutations enable it to.
Uncorrected mutations within a species are 99 times out of 100 harmful to the species or its offspring (or sometimes they don't do anything to the phenotype of the species at all).
So is there benifit to species for mistakes in DNA replication? No, not usually (if your talking of DNA replication in the present), unless it's on a microorganism such as bacteria (which mutate all the time) for example it may mutate in a way which changes its form of contraction (eg. from being transferred from host to host via say physical contacts of the hosts), the mutation may cause it to function in a different way which makes the host say sneeze, which as a result transfers replications of itself to other hosts more effectively (in droplets dispersed via the sneeze).
Most mutations result in disease and death in more complex organisms, be it when alive and growing/repairing (generating DNA) or when passing on DNA to offspring (reproducing). There may be marginal benifits (like mentioned by the person before me- people with sickle cell anemia being more immune to malaria, etc), but more than likely it will do more harm than good, as our genome has refined like most animals over millions of years, to become the most stable build if you will, however due to environmental changes mutations will provide the future, as life ever adapts to its surroundings thanks to the mutant genes (most fitting genes live, obsolete ones die)..
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Without mutations (DNA replication errors), the only life forms on Earth would be indestructible but very primitive microorganisms.
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