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Originally Posted by kennyc
Mutations are not the genome they are mutations.
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What do you think the mutations mutate?
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That is an environmental effect. Identical twins have identical genomes.
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I've posted links reporting on two scientific reports which disagree with you.
I think I'll believe Scientific American over 'some guy on the internet'.
From the more recent link:
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To find out how often these mutations occur in early development, Li and her colleagues studied the genomes of 92 pairs of identical twins and searched hundreds of thousands of sites in their genomes for differences between twins in base pairs, which are represented by letters that make up DNA. For instance, one twin may carry an A at one point while another carries a C. The researchers could only detect differences that would occur very early in fetal development and would show up in most cells in the body.
They then calculated the frequency with which these mutations occurred. Only two sets of twins had such mutations, which translates to a DNA change occurring once for every 10 million to 10 billion bases that are copied every time a cell divides. While that may seem like a high accuracy rate, cells in the body divide trillions of times. So that would mean an average twin pair carries 359 genetic differences that occurred early in development.
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