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by Dylan16807 1149 days ago
The average child is born with about 60-70 mutations. A couple tweaks won't break up the species.
2 comments

Do you have a citation for this?

That number seems within the same order of magnitude as I was expecting, but the fact that this has been quantified is fascinating.

Are there similar numbers for mutations per cell division or averages per year of life?

Rates of Spontaneous Mutation (Drake et al., 1998)[1] says that a human's genome accumulates around ~64 new mutations per generation through meiosis alone. Those mutations are propagated into every cell of the newborn baby. Over a lifespan, all cells in the body will mutate at a rate proportional to their division rate, leading to thousands upon thousands[2] of uncorrected mutations per individual, among the trillions which are ultimately corrected by DNA polymerase[3].

[1] https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/148.4.1667

[2] https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fs41586-022-04618-z

[3] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf9011

Note there's a selection bias here: any lethal mutation that causes a fetus to spontaneously die before a child is born is uncounted here. There are many tweaks that are fatal during development, you just don't count them if you only look at born children.
But is that selection bias relevant here? The tweaks we're comparing against are not lethal ones. The category is genetic spread among living humans, so mutations in living children should be the correct number to use as a baseline.

It's true that that selection bias exists, but so do a hundred other kinds of selection bias in earlier steps. As long we we're not looking at those steps, and any bias in them is already factored in to our number, we don't need to worry about those details.