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I majored in Biology, with a focus in genetics and computer science because I wanted to go into bioinformatics. I could literally write 30 pages about why what
by Declanomous 8y ago
I majored in Biology, with a focus in genetics and computer science because I wanted to go into bioinformatics. I could literally write 30 pages about why what you wrote is incorrect, and it would take several orders of magnitude more time than it took you to write out your hypothesis.
I provided resources for you to educate yourself. If you believe that it isn't a good use of your time, that's exactly how I feel about addressing the points you made beyond broadly saying 'this won't work, here are resources that address this on a level which you can understand.'
In this case 'almost no chance' is somewhat analogous to shuffling a deck of cards and finding them in order by suit and value, and then shuffling them again and finding them in reverse order by suit and value, and repeating that feat 10 times over.
The length of a human's telomeres when they are born is about 11k base pairs. Chromosome 21 is the shortest chromosome, and has 46.7 million base pairs. That means with random chance a mutation is 4200 times more likely to occur in the coding region of the chromosome than in the telomere.
Due to the way DNA Polymerase works, you will lose 20 base pairs of DNA on every replication. Ignoring everything about rate of mutations and the likelihood of insertion mutation, this means your chance of lengthening your chromosome through mutations is (1/4200)^20, or 1 in 2.6x10^72.
The odds of shuffling a deck of cards and having it come out in suit and value order is somewhere around 1x10^68.
That's using a best-case scenario as an example. Chromosome 1 has more than 5 times as many base pairs as chromosome 21, and you'd literally need to have this happen on every single chromosome every single time you had cell division.
- Declanomous 8y agoA quick follow-up to this point. The exome, or coding region of the DNA is approximately 1% of the genome, so arguably the chances of a mutation randomly occurring in a coding region are 1/100 as probable as I suggested here. There are a few caveats: 1) The non-coding region appears to be less useless than previously assumed. There are still 'highly preserved' areas in non-coding regions. If a section of the genome is highly preserved, it means that a mutation in that region probably results in death/non-viability of the organism. 2) We know the rate of mutation of the genome. If random mutations were really adding enough base pairs in the telomere region to lengthen it, the genome would be growing at an incredible rate. There are a lot of reasons why it's also implausible, but they have to do with the amount of energy in a bond, etc. and other biochemistry stuff that I'm not qualified to comment on.