But it also had deleterious health consequences to people.

Introduce some mutations perhaps.

Cell loss, mutations in chromosomes, mutations in the mitochondria and so on.

They're mutations caused by radiation.

In order for one of those mutations let me do the mutations in different colors. That's a purple mutation.

And I really want to make that point there, because we talk about mutations, but there's different types of mutations.

And mutations that damage the TOR gene just like the daf 2 mutations extend lifespan in worms and flies and mice.

I'm always interested to look at DNA and mutations.

Small population size, non random mating, mutations and gene flow.

And these mutations accumulate approximately as a function of time.

In a biohacker space, you can analyze your genome for mutations.

If you have this deleterious mutation in this gene, you're 90 percent likely to get cancer in your life.

Cooking made it possible that mutations, natural selections, our environment, could develop us.

We pump energy into this and see what happens in a couple of mutations.

That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties.

But, enough mutations can bypass the fail safes, driving the cell to divide recklessly.

That's the sound of genetic mutations of the avian flu becoming a deadly human flu.

These different mice are different mutations that recapitulate different kinds of blindness that affect humans.

Now these mutations can accumulate over time eventually causing cells to malfunction and even die prematurely.

But the whole point is that mutations don't seem to be a satisfying source of variation.

If mutations were the only source of variation, then I could just bud off other Sals.

No, there is just these random changes that happened and mutations in viruses and bacteria happen frequently.

But if you have a sexual species, then it's possible for an individual to inherit both mutations from different lineages.

So if you have mutations in your germ cells, or during the process of meiosis, you have essentially recombination of

Are we in fact putting ourselves in a situation where we're coming too close to thresholds that could lead to deleterious and very undesired, if now catastrophic, change for human development?

So through natural selection, over time, mutations, variations that disrupt the function of a protein will not be tolerated over time.

But as you're thinking about this, one of the interesting things is how small these mutations are and where they take place.

last several videos, I talked a lot about mutations and what does that do to a species, but think about what happens.

There's some mutations that won't be passed on to your children, and those are the ones that occur in your somatic cells.

What they found was a series of mutations in a gene called SPR, which is responsible for producing serotonin, among other things.

And we can then see the result of such mutations when we compare DNA sequences among us here in the room, for example.

So, the states, are equivalent classes of history, and the cancer patient, the input, is the environment, the diet, the treatment, the genetic mutations.

And we were very lucky to find that mutations that damage one single gene called daf 2 doubled the lifespan of the little worm.

Because by the second day of incubation ... any cells that have undergone reversion mutations ... give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship.

And then one thing that I kind of point to, we talked about this a little bit in the DNA video, is this notion of mutations.

In an asexual species, if you get two different mutations in different creatures, a green one and a red one, then one has to be better than the other.

Vitamin and mineral deficiencies, protein imbalances, nutrient toxicities, excess intake, malabsorption, or overelimination, nutrient storage or processing abnormalities, and even genetic mutations and polymorphism can all be contributors to malnutrition.

It spreads through the population, has mutations that allow it to evade the immune system, and it's the only cancer that we know of that's threatening an entire species with extinction.

So out of all of the let's say there's 280 million sperm cells that at one time are being competitive for an egg, it's possible that some of them have mutations.

So blindness is a big problem, and a lot of these blind disorders come from inherited diseases, so we want to try and better understand which mutations in the gene cause the disease.

Cancer occurs when a single cell in your body acquires a set of random mutations in important genes that cause that cell to start to produce more and more and more copies of itself.

And what they found was that people who lived to 90 or 100 were more likely to have daf 2 mutations that is, changes in the gene that encodes the receptor for IGF 1.

The most important health challenges today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather result from a complex and dynamic interplay between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites and our immune response.

And when you have a population of fast dividing cancer cells, if one of them acquires new mutations, which allow them to grow more quickly, acquire nutrients more successfully, invade the body, they'll be selected for by evolution.

They could be a source or kind of contribute on the margin, but there must be something more profound than mutations that's creating the diversity even within, or maybe I should call it the variation, even within a population.