What does it mean to have Random Mutations?

hmmm. We are definitely dealing with a different notion of "random" than I became used to way back when.

Back then, one could make a "random" choice from a bag of marbles with quite unequal distributions of color among them. One could randomly flip a biased coin. There were various probability distributions, and a random selection from one simply meant that the probabilities of the choice were given by the distribution from which the selection was made.

 

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well then open the thread

can you post without ranting?

(or even stay on topic?)



:fart:

:crazy:

:wallbang:

 

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Any of the assorted dog morphs. Hypertensive rats. Drosophila with legs growing out of their heads. And so and so on, ad infinitum.

 

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I did not read all the posts to this thread. I read many & quickly scanned some more.

I apologize if post repeats ideas already posted.

I do not think it has it has been established that mutations are random.

To validly claim that a process is random, one must specify the pertinent distribution (EG: Poisson, Binomial, Chi-Square, Normal, et cetera). I do not think that anyone knows enough to specify a specific distribution.

There is no reason to suppose that mutations are deterministic or purposefully directed, but this does not establish that they are random.

 

Some proportion of them target gene sites, but the outcome could hardly be said to be deterministic.