Beneficial Mutations

• Even “beneficial” mutations are a loss of information

• Imagine there exists a book-attacking virus that when it finds the word “tree” eats the sentence in which it appears thereby effectively “killing” the book by making it not understandable

• Now image a “find and replace all” mutation that changes all “tree”s to “trek”s

• The book now survives the “tree virus” but the quality of the book has been degraded as the tree-containing sentences are not as understandable

• The biological analogy: a gene mutation alters the shape of the built protein such that a virus can no longer attach to it – the organism now survives the virus but the quality of the protein has been degraded and some biological function is not performed quite as well