Isn’t that just survival bias?
The proposed mechanism of directed DNA repair is not impossible, but the article itself does not give sufficient reasons to justify such assumptions.
It makes sense that organisms would evolve to prevent random mutations in DNA that’s critical to the survival of the organism.
Not necessarily. The mechanism that is explained here is about repairing damage from random mutations. Such DNA repair is costly and in a plant that produces lots of seeds it might be more efficient to just let those with mutations in critical genes die.
Sure, there can be different effective strategies here. On the other hand, natural selection would favor plants that can spread as many viable seeds as possible. So, you also have a selection pressure to ensure that a large number of seeds takes root. Meanwhile, additional energy cost is only a constraint assuming the plant is getting just enough energy to get by.
Isn’t that just survival bias?
Well, no. If they had not performed the largest Arabidopsis mutation accumulation experiment in history and had not carefully tracked all mutations occurring across a population of thousands of plants growing in controlled conditions across multiple generations, you might be able to argue survivor bias.
They demonstrated that germline mutations that affect actual functional proteins simply are not passed on half as often as mutations in junk DNA. That’s a pretty big deal.
I guess you got these details from the original paper? Because the linked article does not explain that at all.
There’s a link to Nature at the bottom of the article but its full of wierd redirects. Here is the actual (open acess) article I think https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04269-6
Maybe a sign of some kind of coordination of the traits of progeny by organisms? Like, they have some mechanism to actively determine what genes would be better for survival?
