No, “mutation” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad”. It just means “different than where it was copied from”. Ie the RNA made a copying mistake at some point. If the

No, “mutation” doesn’t necessarily mean “bad”. It just means “different than where it was copied from”. Ie the RNA made a copying mistake at some point. If the copy error happens in the creation of egg or sperm cells, then that “mutation” is passed on to the child conceived by those particular cells. Most of these errors don’t cause any problems so they are just “noise” in the gene pool. The ones that will straight up kill you don’t exist because those children are never born. Then there are others that are mixed bags and cause stuff like sickle cell disease which causes lots of problems but is prominent in some populations because it also confers resistance to malaria. And then there’s ones that do things that probably don’t matter much, like changing your eye color or making you slightly taller or more likely to hate cilantro or be lactose tolerant or whatever.