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What If There Were No More Mutants?

March 12th, 2008
Author Andrea Thompson

» What If There Were No More Mutants?

Yesterday’s New York Times had a blog post by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson that explores an interesting thought experiment: What would happen to evolution if you could stop all mutations to genes?The answer, in short, is that evolution would continue to go on for millennia. As long as there are variations in the genes of a particular population, natural selection will continue to act on those variations, favoring some gene variants over others, Judson says.Sex would also keep evolution going, because it shuffles genes to continue producing new combinations.”What all this means is that even if I waved my wand and stopped mutation for good, there are at least some species in which evolution could carry on for ages, perhaps indefinitely,” Judson writes.