Mutations More Common, Less Harmful Than Previously Thought

7/18/17 U.K. Guardian:

We are all mutants. The 3bn pieces of DNA that make us who we are were long thought to be constant, chiselled in granite like a classical monument, with only tiny changes made here and there. Scientists used to believe that DNA mutations were largely harmful.

By the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the first sequences of the human genome came rolling in, researchers realised that their view of mutations was completely backwards. Instead of being rarities that almost inevitably harm health, mutations litter the human genome. The average human carries around 400 unique mutations, and most of us are none the worse because of them.

Mutations are at the core of evolution; lack of knowledge of them was for many years a large problem with Darwin's theory.  Creationists have long used the apparently high lethality of mutations as arguments against evolution; pretty clearly, even if 99% of mutations were lethal or even no advantage, it would not impair evolutionary theory.  If at least some tiny fraction of mutations provide a clear advantage in some environment, that would be enough.

But if the mutations are widespread and generally have no effect, it suggests that biologists have been working with wrong assumptions for a very long time.  This is part of why arrogant assumptions about knowing how evolution works are unwise.  There is still a lot to learn.

The Eugenics of Progressive Thought

It is very popular to think of eugenics as a reactionary, Nazi idea.  I saw a Swedish documentary on Netflix a while back, that while it mentioned the Nazi Germany and U.S. eugenics efforts usually performed at the state level of oppression.  Example: Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942), which ruled that exempting white collar criminals from Oklahoma's "three strikes and you are snipped" sterilization law violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.  Mandatory srterilization was not a problem.  Buck v. Bell (1927) upholding Virginia's mandatory sterilization of the feeble minded is memorable for liberal Justice Holmes' observation: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

The bulk of the documentary was about Swedish eugenics laws.  8/28/1997 The Economist describes it:

THE Nazis were not alone in viewing Nordic peoples as the ideal biological “type”. A lot of Nordics, it now seems, immodestly felt the same way. All four main Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden—brought in eugenics laws in the 1930s. More remarkably, some of those laws stayed on the statute books until the mid-1970s, though apparently they were not latterly used very often. It is a subject which most of today's Nordic folk would rather keep in decent obscurity, but a series of articles in an influential Stockholm newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, has been shocking the Swedes to the core and making other Nordics look back nervously at the not-so-recent past.

Between 1935 and 1976, the newspaper says, no fewer than 60,000 young Swedish women deemed mentally defective or otherwise handicapped to a degree “which makes them incapable of looking after their children” were sterilised. More embarrassingly, this happened under laws passed in 1934 by a vigorous new Social Democratic government—a hitherto esteemed forebear of Sweden's present rulers. The laws lapsed only in 1976.

To its many supporters in the 1930s, the policy served three purposes: to prevent the “degeneration of the race”, especially as feeble-minded and insane people were supposed to breed more freely than thrifty and energetic people of “superior” stock; to be kind—yes, that is how it was rationalised—to people who needed “protection” against propagating their own weak genes; and lastly, as the Stockholm newspaper explained, to save the state the heavy cost of welfare for the very dim.

The National Socialists were a heresy of progressivism, but in some especially ugly areas, not so far removed.  This eugenics movement was a logical byproduct of Social Darwinism.

Astonishing Claim About Pre-Cambrian Fossils

From December 13, 2012 news.com.au, a rather astonishing claim:

EVIDENCE that the world's first animals formed in the Flinders Ranges 550 million years ago has been called into question by new research published today in the journal Nature.

Professor Gregory Retallack ,from the University of Oregon, says "most of the better known and iconic Ediacaran fossils of South Australia" were not animals.

"These large fossils were organisms that lived on land, not in the sea," he said.
"They were probably neither plants nor animals, but fungi, a separate kingdom."

Okay, somewhat interesting, but not terribly so.  Until we get this later in the article:

Yesterday Professor Retallack said the tubular shells of Cloudina and organic tubes of Sinosabellidites may have been animals - but added that "other evidence for Ediacaran animals had been falsified".

He said the first animals emerged much later in the Ediacaran period and didn't "appear in force" until the Cambrian period. 

Falsified?  You mean, like Piltdown Man?  That's an astonishing claim, and I would love to hear more.

Here is a more clear explanation of the dispute from December 12, 2012 Science Now which explains that the argument is about whether these are marine or land fossils:

The fossils of various frondlike and sacklike organisms that supposedly lived at the bottom of ancient oceans may actually represent some of the earliest organisms to dwell on land. That's the controversial interpretation of a new study, which suggests that rocks long thought to have been formed from sediments deposited on ancient seafloors may actually be the remnants of early soils. If true, the finding would push back life's transition from sea to land by tens of millions of years—and possibly by 100 million years or more.

Fossils reveal that life on Earth diversified rapidly during the Cambrian period, which began about 542 million years ago and lasted until about 485 million years ago. The so-called Cambrian explosion yielded most of the major groups of animals known today, but fossils of a host of organisms bearing little resemblance to modern life forms are embedded in Precambrian rocks—including those of the Ediacaran period, which began about 635 million years ago and lasted until the onset of the Cambrian. Most researchers have considered these unusual organisms—some resemble segmented worms or fronds, and others look like nothing more than bags of tissue—to have lived in the sea, because the types of rocks that entombed them typically accumulate as sediments in marine environments.

I still want to know why Retallack says that other evidence was "falsified."  That's quite a claim to make, unless he meant in the sense of "proven wrong."  (One of the tests of scientific theory is whether you can "falsify" it: prove it wrong or right.)