What does it mean to have Random Mutations?

zion said:
Mutations caused by ionizing radiation work through particular chemical processes - so they are still partially dependent on the DNA sequence and the contents of the cell. They are not 100% random.
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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.
 
thinking said:
if what your saying that random mutations are " actually the fair proportion " of genetic mutations give an example of one then ?
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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.
 
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.
 
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