On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 3:52 PM, Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com>wrote:
**** > >> >> It's not news that some chemicals increase the rate of mutation. >> > > **** > > > Epigenetic changes that effect what is transcribed is not mutation – at > least in the classic sense of changing – i.e. mutating – the underlying > DNA. The DNA is not mutated; the underlying sequence of bases remains > unaltered. > It's true that epigenetic changes don't effect the underlying DNA, but that is a distinction of little or no importance to Evolution because all it's interested in is the resulting phenotype and how well the animal does in getting its inheritance factors (regardless of if those factors are made of DNA base pairs or methylation) into the next generation. Perhaps on a distant planet there is a ecosystem that doesn't use DNA or methylation at all, but it must have some mechanism of inheritance and that mechanism must be very reliable but not perfectly so because there must be some way to generate random changes. And on that distant planet Darwinian natural selection would still be needed to separate the good changes from the bad. > it seems to me – that life dances on the knife edge between order and > chaos. Stray too far towards either chaos or order and life very quickly > stops living. > Yes, I agree. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.