3 ms·

genuinely curious: how does any life still exist if this holds true?

• scotty79 3mo ago
  When the damage accumulates across generations the natural selection has opportunity to weed out particularly harmful instances. You can get a feeling for how important avoiding the mitochondrial damage is and how hard it is to mitigate, by looking at how fiercely the reproductive process protects them from aging.
  • someonebaggy 3mo ago
    And with this you get a hundred times the damage (mutation) but still only the same amount of selection.
• jmcgough 3mo ago
  I think they're arguing that a somatic cell from an older human contains mitochondria that's more degraded. Egg cells are all created before birth, and each is pre-seeded with a large number of mitochondria.