Dare to be boring

[nancylebov]

There's been recent news that a species of mustard can have paired mutant genes but still produce normal offspring. The current tentative explanation is that the plant (and perhaps many other species) maintains a copy of the good genes--perhaps its entire genome--which can sometimes override mutations.

While I generally prefer that the world be weirder than it looks, I'm betting that the particular mutation is unstable and has a small chance of reverting to the normal form on its own.

Comments

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

I read about this in the Washington Post, and plan to follow it closely. VERY interesting it is.

[madfilkentist]

That suggests that nature invented backups to deal with data corruption long before people did.