• lobsterasteroid@lemmy.ml
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    3 years ago

    Isn’t that just survival bias?

    Well, no. If they had not performed the largest Arabidopsis mutation accumulation experiment in history and had not carefully tracked all mutations occurring across a population of thousands of plants growing in controlled conditions across multiple generations, you might be able to argue survivor bias.

    They demonstrated that germline mutations that affect actual functional proteins are passed on only has as often as junk dna mutations. The key point is, they proved these mutations do not get passed on and instead get repaired before there is a real chance for natural selection to operate. That’s a pretty big deal in itself.

    Whether or not histones are the exact mechanism is a little beside the point.