Nonetheless, certain other mutations can greatly impact the life and function of an organism. For example, somatic mutations that affect cell division (particularly those that allow cells to ...

A gene known as HbS was the center of a medical and evolutionary detective story that began in the middle 1940s in Africa. Doctors noticed that patients who had sickle cell anemia, a serious ...

In point mutations, one base pair is changed. The human genome, for example, contains over 3.1 billion bases of DNA, and each base must be faithfully replicated for cell division to occur.

That makes knowing the rate at which it occurs crucial to the study of evolutionary biology. Mutation rate figures into all kinds of calculations. For example, the “molecular clocks” that evolutionary ...