The increase in the world's population has led to the emergence of unique mutations
Last reviewed: 20.11.2021
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The emergence of previously unknown genetic deviations and an increase in the frequency of unique mutations is not necessarily the cause of the overshooting background radiation - it is enough only to sharply increase the number of the population.
The more steeply the population increases, the more mutations are revealed in the gene pool of the world's population.
The reason, according to which in the current society increasingly occur genetic diseases, lurks not only in a polluted environment, infested with mutagens. As scientists in the journal Science inform from the Cornell Institute (USA), previously not known mutations began to manifest themselves only due to the fact that we became more.
The frequency of a mutation can be predicted with the help of technologies of population genetics, which combines the tool of classical genetics with the provisions of the evolutionary concept. The main characteristics that are taken into account in this case are the size of the population, its dynamics, the degree of mutagenesis, the type of mutation we are interested in. This makes it possible to predict the future of a genetic anomaly - whether this mutation will be fixed in the population or it will disappear, and how quickly this will happen. However, as the authors of the note say, ordinary mathematical models are not adapted to the accelerated increase in the species size.
This happened to the population of the Earth: over the past 10 thousand years the number of people has jumped from several million to 7 billion, with the greatest acceleration occurred in the last 2 thousand years, or over the past 100 generations. Of course, even within the last period of time, this growth was random, for some time the number of people grew consistently, until the cumulative progress made the existence of man the most convenient and safe. To assess the genetic dynamics of a population, scientists tend to model its growth from some original number of individuals. In this case, it was found that the genetic dynamics in human populations are preferably estimated in a sample of 10,000 individuals-against several dozen that were used in the early models. Previous models, based on linear, rather than exponential growth of the population, in predictions of mutation frequencies gave a 500% error. It should be emphasized that here primarily the type of growth is significant: a phased, linear growth of the population gives time to rare mutations to leave the gene pool.
The explosion of population led to the fact that numerous rare species of genes are found much more often than expected. Thus, natural mutagenesis has a large field for activity, and in the future the human race is awaited by new mutations initiated from non-existence by a skew in population dynamics. Maybe the fantastic "People X" will become an ordinary reality - and they will not leave secret laboratories, but will be formed by a natural evolutionary-genetic way.
It is hardly a big exaggeration to note that already today almost any of us are in some measure, but a mutant. First of all, however, the results obtained will give an opportunity to evaluate in an entirely new way the seriousness of genetic diseases, from the simplest to the most complex like autism, which can develop due to dozens and hundreds of all kinds of mutations.