(May 3, 2011 at 12:58 pm)oggtheclever Wrote: Most mutations are benign and therefore have no benefit and get lost in the mix.. It's only those that provide the organism with some advantage when it comes to surviving long enough to procreate that survive and get passed on to the next generation.
Simply put, benign mutations make no difference, harmful mutations probably cause the organism to die and never reproduce and beneficial mutations help the organism to pass on its genes to the next generation.
Tell your friend to read a decent book about evolution and to stop listening to what his like minded friends tell him.
Yep. I started with The Complete Idiot's Guide to Evolution and Evolution for Dummies. One book goes into the science, the other covers the, ahem, evolution of the idea. I still have them both and refer to them constantly.
OP, most mutations do nothing, as noted above. Then you have the beneficial mutations, which get passed on if the host is lucky. Finally you have the harmful mutations, which take the host out of the gene pool. So your friend has it bass-ackwards.
