When you get sick with the flu you get infected with flu viruses and they make lots of new flu viruses, but those new viruses are not exact copies of the old ones. They have mutations in them. A lot of those mutations are harmful.
No matter how numerous they may be, mutations do not produce any kind of evolution.
Although random mutations influenced the course of evolution, their influence was mainly by loss, alteration, and refinement. . . Never, however, did that one mutation make a wing, a fruit, a woody stem, or a claw appear. Mutations, in summary, tend to induce sickness, death, or deficiencies. No evidence in the vast literature of heredity changes shows unambiguous evidence that random mutation itself, even with geographical isolation of populations, leads to speciation.
Choose your mutations carefully. . .
D. N. A. sequences change by mutations, and the idea behind the molecular clock is that those changes occur at, more or less, a constant rate, over time.
You would think that UV just causes mutations, but it doesn't; you need a gene to be active for it.
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.
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.
In the meantime, the educated public continues to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection--quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection tautology.
In Darwin's theory, you just have to substitute 'mutations' for his 'slight accidental variations' (just as quantum theory substitutes 'quantum jump' for 'continuous transfer of energy'). In all other respects little change was necessary in Darwin's theory.
There is some research that suggests that viruses like the flu are really actually kind of at the razor's edge when it comes to mutation. They're mutating so fast that if they mutated much faster they would actually develop a lot of harmful mutations that could slow them down and cripple them and eventually literally drive them extinct.
Exploitation, mutilation, mutations, confirmation to the evils of the world.
I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.
The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
