Episode 1 - Introduction to Biology 

I'll soon get in the biology uni , this channel really made me love biology more XD

Yess you are right 😅

Yess absolutely

Yeah!

Mutations are random in the sense that it's pretty much impossible to predict where an error will occur during meiosis/mitosis or from exposure to a carcinogen or radiation. You have billions of nucleotide bases packed into each cell, and if an ultraviolet photon hits it at just the right spot, it can fuse bases together or change one base into another. Many mutations are silent, or harmless. Many are harmful. A small portion are beneficial. Once the mutation occurs, the downstream effects are not random. That mutation exists within a specific gene, and the mutation will alter that gene such that the protein or regulatory function is altered, and this can lead to predictable alterations to protein functionality, tissue development, metabolism, etc. All of this, including natural selection and sexual selection, is decidedly non random, but the initial acquisition of the mutation itself is functionally random. The key detail is that harmful mutations will generally kill the organism, or lead to it being outcompeted by its peers. Harmful mutations tend to produce organisms that can't reproduce effectively, so they don't pass on their genes. Or at least, they pass on their genes less often than those with fewer harmful mutations, and over time, over multiple generations, those individuals with harmful mutations will represent a smaller and smaller portion of the population as they get outcompeted by healthier individuals. On this note, the only animals that do pass on their genes are those that are fit enough to survive, find a mate, and successfully raise offspring, thus propagating their relatively healthy genes into the next generation. Mutations that have a beneficial effect will increase the odds that the organism can reproduce, and improve the speed at which these beneficial mutations spread through the population to reach fixation. The reason life hasn't gone extinct is because, while those organisms with harmful mutations do tend to die out, those organisms with beneficial mutations will persist and the next generation will have more of these beneficial mutations than previous generations.

​@@BiologicPodcast But is it truly possible to get a 10% beneficial mutation through random mutations? Let us say a gene of a protein with 100 amino acids would need 300 correct nucleotide bases to express. We can convert this roughly to a 50 word paragraph, with each letter of a word, a nucleotide base, each word an amino acid. What is the possibility of creating a grammatically functional paragraph by typing random letters, deleting random words, in the paragraph, so that the paragraph would be BETTER than it originally was to a changing environment? Let us say from a narrative paragraph to becoming an scientific essay? Would it be 10% chance possibility? I doubt it would even be .001% chance. Each word in each sentence most coincide with the sense of that sentence, and each sentence must coincide with the sentences before and after it, and all the sentences must coincide with the overall theme for that paragraph. And that whole paragraph must coincide with the necessary theme/topic to survive. That would be IMPOSSIBLE using random typing. In fact it would even be more impossible with DNA mutations, because it only uses 20 functional ‘words’, ie. amino acids to form it’s ‘paragraph’s, ie genes. Whereas in our example you can use all the 171,146 functional words in the English language to make an expression. And not only that, a genetic mutation in a cell must coincide with the whole system and organization of an organism to create whole functional parts or organs so that it would not accidentally grow wings on its face to fly, or grow fur in its lungs instead of its skin to survive winter. If it is nearly, if not completely impossible to create beneficial random mutations to survive a particular environment, why is life all around us?

I'm a materialist in the sense that I don't see some inherent difference in the matter that makes up living things as opposed to non-living things. There isn't something magical about the carbon atoms in my hand, as compared to the carbon atoms in the CO2 in the air or the carbon in the steel components of my car. If there's anything "special" about life, it's the complexity of its chemical organization relative to that of non-living things, like rocks, gasses, and ices.