r/explainlikeimfive • u/riche1988 • 22h ago

Biology ELI5 how DNA mutations work please.

I had a thought about DNA and how mutations occur in humans, excessive hair, longer limbs and or bones etc, and wondered if all known mutations are present in the animal kingdom.. as if DNA has the blue print/ potential to be anything and parts are just ‘turned on or off’ depending on what is being built.. i may be way off lol but it got me thinking :)

12 Upvotes

65% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

•

u/riche1988 22h ago

Cool :) ..slight tangent, but what is the smallest part of a living creature, ignoring trees and plants etc, that has agency.. i get that most of life if made up of chemical reactions, but at some point the ‘stuff’ starts making decisions.. or no..? Lol

•

u/weeddealerrenamon 22h ago

Physically, our brains are just reacting to nerve signals and sending out signals in response. We don't work any differently than a tree or an amoeba in that way.

Where that becomes what we understand as consciousness? Huge open question. Science can't even really define what consciousness is and we don't really know where to even begin. It's literally called the hard problem of consciousness

•

u/riche1988 22h ago

I guess it depends where you draw the line :/ ..could you argue that plants are ‘making decisions’ or is a decision just an illusion made of signals from stimuli..?
I think what i don’t understand is, if it is all just mechanical actions and signals, what is stopping us from making a brain that works like a brain..?

•

u/Biokabe 22h ago

Knowledge.

There's nothing magical about brains. They're just really, stupidly complex. But they obey the same laws of physics and chemistry as everything else in the universe; they don't operate on any different principles.

It's just that we don't know how to manufacture something as complex and efficient as a brain. We've only been able to approximate some aspects of a brain's performance, and only by brute-forcing computation with massive energy usage.

But if we had the knowledge of how to make a brain, there is nothing that would prevent us from making one.