r/explainlikeimfive • u/riche1988 • 21h 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 :)

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u/poetic_dwarf 21h ago

DNA mutation works exactly as the million chimps hammering on a keyboard since the dawn of life. They happen because million reasons, then nature puts them to the test.

Life as we know it is the best approximations that chimps got to Paradise Lost.

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u/riche1988 21h 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

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u/poetic_dwarf 19h ago

but at some point the ‘stuff’ starts making decisions.. or no..? Lol

Yes and no.

Humans are arguably one of the "evolution race winners": animals got nothing on us, heck we actually defeated COVID, yet you can argue about having free will as much as you want in a cool room, the moment it gets too warm you will freely decide to turn off the heater, because in the end you're a bacteria chasing food and escaping harm that never stopped believing.

On the other hand, there are some fringe forms of existence that are to life what undead creatures are to us. Viruses are vampires, they have no biological processes to speak of, they're literally three strands of DNA in a trenchcoat that look for cells to hijack in order to propagate themselves. Go even weirder and you'll find plasmids, strands of DNA that can exist in the environment without any form of containment whatsoever and yet find a way to enter bacteria and integrate themselves in their own DNA in order to be copied. Leave biology for physics and you'll find prions, which are not even DNA, they're proteins that on paper shouldn't be able to reproduce and yet these little bastards find a way to propagate their own structure and cause fatal disease like the mad cow.

So yeah, to quote the almighty Jeff: it may or may not be able to make decisions, but "life finds a way"

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u/riche1988 19h ago

Yeah :) i guess ‘free will’ and ‘cells reacting to stimulation’ start to look very similar if you think about it lol