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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Inheritance
libfemme ( 05/22/2004, 09:30:10 )One concept people seem to have trouble grasping is that all humans on the planet are related. But it’s inevitable.Consider the family. You and your brother are two entirely different people. You marry different wives, have different children, and would seem to be entirely separate. And yet his father is also your father. In other words your father is not yours alone. And,it would follow, what you inherited from your father may not be yours alone.Let’s suppose your father had a mutation in his germ line. In that case his mutation would be copied and end up in the sperm that later developed into you. Now there would be two copies of this particular mutation that exist in the world. But every gene has a 50/50 chance of being passed on to your brother as well.So although this supposed mutation started out as one singular event in your father, it has tripled. Question: is the gene yours now or your brothers? Answer it is yours, your brothers and your fathers. Your individual genes are not unique. All of them, every single one, is a copy of someone else’s. How many people now share your gene depends on how many generations ago said gene came into existence, that is “mutated”.Suppose you walk down the street and you meet another person by chance. What are the odds that this new person has any genes in common with you? Excellent actually. Suppose you were to compare DNA with this new person and discovered that he too had the same mutated gene on the short end of the 17th chromosome that you do. Where did he get this? Is it likely that out of the billions of nucleotides every human carries that he mutated the exact same gene in the exact same way in close proximity in place and time to you? No, it isn't.More likely if you asked him who his mother was, and then asked “her” who her mother was you would come up with the name of very your own grandmother. In other words the further back in generation any particular gene is traced the more widely it will have had time to spread.Now you may complain that it is unlikely you would not know your own cousin on the street, so let’s take the analogy back another step further. Do you know all the descendents of your great-great grandmother? (And by the way how many great-great grandmothers would you have had?)It has been estimated, that if you go back seven generations every person in Ohio can claim to be related to John Glenn. There is nothing special about John Glenn. The odds are the same for any person in the state. The relationship path may be different from one individual to another, but that there will be a path is next to certain. Why? Because certain genetic lines are always dying off and the remaining people intermarry. As a consequence, at some level you are related to every person on the planet.Genes spread very rapidly through the generational levels. The further back in time you go the greater the opportunity any particular gene mutation would have spread throughout the population. If that particular gene was one that conferred a survival advantage over all others, then it is certain to wind up in all members of the population eventually. In other words all the competitor genes would have died out.Even inheriting one gene that conferred an ever-so-slight tendency to retard bleeding from a minor scratch would be a tremendous advantage over another individual who had no ability whatsoever. Even if you died as well, you would at least die second. And that gives you more of an opportunity to reproduce before you die then he has. The odds, over hundreds and hundreds of minor battles, over thousands and thousands of generations, would be that the individual with the ever so slight tendency to retard bleeding would have more offspring surviving than the individual who had none. Your slight tendency to retard bleeding gene would multiply a million-fold. Why? Because by out-surviving your competitor, your offspring got more access to food, territory, mates etc. than the competitor did. Remember going extinct doesn’t have to take one generation. It took millions of years for the dinosaurs to die out. We’re talking about House Odds here. You know, any casino has a slight advantage of odds over the players. It doesn't have to be much. The point is that the wheel is spun so many times, that in the long run the House wins.So too with a version of a particular gene that is just a sliver more advantageous than the other genes out there for that same trait. When you’re talking billions of years, of course, there are no animals alive today who did not evolve blood clotting. Any such animal born would have died out too fast to have had a chance to survive let alone reproduce.Only because somebody had a gene mutate were they alive to breed another generation, and therefore evolution was able to take the path it did. If such a gene had not mutated, life would have developed in a different path and we wouldn't be here now. The earth is littered with the bones of dead species. There are more species represented in fossils than all the species alive today.Because a gene conferred a slight blood clotting factor mutated, animals that evolved a circulatory system were able to come into existence. How? Probably two individuals, each who had one survival advantage, were the only ones left alive to mate. Their new offspring, however, would then have twice the survival advantage of any other offspring. When this offspring then finds its own mate, who will of course be someone else who has “survived” the competition stakes, any useful mutation that made this mate survive is now added and passed on to their joint offspring. In such a manner useful mutations at various times and various places are additive. This doesn’t happen over night. It doesn’t happen over hundreds of years even. But then how long has life been in existence on this planet? We’ve had all the time in the world.
This Message is being posted for educational purposes, as well as for comment and criticism, by the visitors to the HumanCloning.org Foundation website (www.HumanCloning.org ).
Disclaimer: Information provided on this web site is for educatonal purposes only. It is not a substitute for, nor can it replace advice from your own physician.
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