Mutations Out of Three Billion Base Pairs

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The genetic neck is being shuffled a lot in nature and in humanity, right? So. Ye, its it's a big number, cause i know how expedentials work. And then secondly, ye, not every gen is going to have a variant ounow you look through d and a. But over time, there's a lot of variation that's there. You and i differ by about one base in every well,. Our irish ancestry might make us a little more closely related, but a, it differ about one base out of a thousand. Inin three billion, that's three million bases that differ between you and i and between any two unrelated individuals in the population.

Evolution is a messy business, involving as it does selection pressures, mutations, genetic drift, and the effects of random external interventions. So in the end, how much of it is predictable, and how much is in the hands of chance? Today we’re thrilled to have as a guest my evil (but more respectable, by most measures) twin, the biologist Sean B. Carroll. Sean is both a leader of the modern evo-devo revolution, and a wonderful and diverse writer. We talk about the importance of randomness and unpredictability in life, from the evolution of species to the daily routine of every individual.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Sean B. Carroll received a Ph.D. in immunology from Tufts University. He is currently the Andrew and Mary Balo and Nicholas and Susan Simon Endowed Chair of Biology at the University of Maryland, Vice-President for Science Education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Executive Director of HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, and Professor Emeritus of Genetics and Molecular Biology at the University of Wisconsin. His new book, A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You, explores the role of chance in the development of life.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.