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Mutation   Listen
noun
mutation  n.  
1.
Change; alteration, either in form or qualities. "The vicissitude or mutations in the superior globe are no fit matter for this present argument."
2.
(Biol.) Gradual definitely tending variation, such as may be observed in a group of organisms in the fossils of successive geological levels.
3.
(Biol.)
(a)
As now employed (first by de Vries), a cellular process resulting in a sudden inheritable variation (the offspring differing from its parents in some well-marked character or characters) as distinguished from a gradual variation in which the new characters become fully developed only in the course of many generations. The occurrence of mutations, the selection of strains carrying mutations permitting enhanced survival under prevailing conditions, and the mechanism of hereditary of the characters so appearing, are well-established facts; whether and to what extent the mutation process has played the most important part in the evolution of the existing species and other groups of organisms is an unresolved question.
(b)
The result of the above process; a suddenly produced variation. Note: Mutations can occur by a change in the fundamental coding sequence of the hereditary material, which in most organisms is DNA, but in some viruses is RNA. It can also occur by rearrangement of an organism's chromosomes. Specific mutations due to a change in DNA sequence have been recognized as causing certain specific hereditary diseases. Certain processes which produce variation in the genotype of an organism, such as sexual mixing of chromosomes in offspring, or artificially induced recombination or introduction of novel genetic material into an organism, are not referred to as mutation.
4.
(Biol.) A variant strain of an organism in which the hereditary variant property is caused by a mutation (3).






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Mutation" Quotes from Famous Books



... if one say that sense can so far rise From non-sense by mutation, or because Brought forth as by a certain sort of birth, 'Twill serve to render plain to him and prove There is no birth, unless there be before Some formed union of the elements, Nor any change, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... sleeve of care—Shakespeare, old man, you had a phrase for everything! I love you. I love everything. I even feel sorry for that poor plant ... of guilt. It couldn't help the fact that my jets set up a mutation. And being intelligent it had to be curious. Of course, no one would believe me if I started talking about intelligent algae. But what's so odd about that? Even the most complex life forms are just aggregations of individual cells working together. So if a ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone

... generation of evolutionists has within the past twenty years arisen which holds that the changes in the organizations of plants and animals do not come by slow growth of favorable characteristics, but arise suddenly. Such is the "Mutation" theory of Hugo de Vries. But science has failed to receive this and similar theories with the same acclaim which once greeted Darwin's "Origin of Species." Naturalists have become cautious. They remember the inglorious collapse of the Darwinian ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner

... may lay severall egges to hatch; and by breaking them at severall ages you may distinctly observe every hourely mutation in them, if you please. The first will bee, that on one side you shall find a great resplendent clearnesse in the white. After a while, a little spott of red matter like bload, will appeare in the middest of that clearnesse fastened to the ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer

... is a contradiction; for if the whole comes from and is governed by an intelligent being, it is impossible to conceive anything in it which tends to the evil or destruction of the whole (viii. 55; x. 6). Everything is in constant mutation, and yet the whole subsists; we might imagine the solar system resolved into its elemental parts, and yet the whole would still subsist "ever ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

... 148: "Vostre Majeste seit les humeurs des Angloys et leur voluntez estre forte discordantes, desireux de nouvellete, de mutation, et vindicatifz, soit pour estre insulaires, ou pour tenir ce natural de la marine."—Renard to Mary: Granvelle Papers, vol. ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... "we are stage managers, scenic artists, stage hands, costumers, modern mutation of the Greek chorus, stays and props for the weak and timid, brakes for the overbold—in fact, we are around to do any work that nobody else wants ...
— The Outdoor Girls at the Hostess House • Laura Lee Hope

... period between the extinct and still older species, why is not every geological formation charged with such links? Why does not every collection of fossil remains afford plain evidence of the gradation and mutation of the forms of life? Although geological research has undoubtedly revealed the former existence of many links, bringing numerous forms of life much closer together, it does not yield the infinitely many fine gradations between past and present species required on the theory, and ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... intended, appears to me to be fraught with more fatal consequences than any other scheme having no relation to the personal rights of the citizens that has ever been devised. If any single scheme could produce the effect of arresting at once that mutation of condition by which thousands of our most indigent fellow-citizens by their industry and enterprise are raised to the possession of wealth, that is the one. If there is one measure better calculated than another to produce that state of things so much deprecated by all true republicans, ...
— Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Harrison • James D. Richardson

... retirement that any person could long keep the character either of a steady Royalist or of a steady Republican. One who, in such an age, is determined to attain civil greatness must renounce all thoughts of consistency. Instead of affecting immutability in the midst of endless mutation, he must be always on the watch for the indications of a coming reaction. He must seize the exact moment for deserting a falling cause. Having gone all lengths with a faction while it was uppermost, he must suddenly extricate himself from it when ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... nature of Christ was absorbed into the divine and lost there; the truth of His being was the divine personality; the human element was only an appearance. Similarly the transubstantiation theory conceives the mutation of the substance of the material elements and the loss of their proper nature; the appearance of reality that the accidents possess is an illusion of the senses. We may note in passing that the opposite error to transubstantiation ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce

... accordingly be in a way more real and enduring than things external. Hence no primitive mind puts all reality, or what is most real in reality, in an abstract material universe. It finds, rather, ideal points of reference by which material mutation itself seems to be controlled. An ideal world is recognised from the beginning and placed, not in the immediate foreground, nearer than material things, but much farther off. It has greater substantiality and independence than material ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... darkness, swallows the created Universe. The old Universe with its Gods is sunk; but it is not final death: there is to be a new Heaven and a new Earth; a higher supreme God, and Justice to reign among men. Curious: this law of mutation, which also is a law written in man's inmost thought, had been deciphered by these old earnest Thinkers in their rude style; and how, though all dies, and even gods die, yet all death is but a phoenix ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... mutation, of which Hugo de Vries, of Holland, is the chief expounder, does not antagonize Darwin, but simply gives more weight in the process of evolution to the factor of sudden changes commonly called sports. Let ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings

... rollers with slow, equable motion. It needs an effort of attention and will to discern the movement, and it is worth while to make the effort, for that clear and poignant sense of the constant flux and mutation of all things around us, and of the ebbing away of our own lives, is fundamental to all elevation of thought, to all nobleness of deed, to all worthy conception of duty and of joy. Everything that is, stands poised, like Fortune, on a rolling ball. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... representation," Gerd said. "You know, that line's so sharp I'd be tempted to think of sapience as a result of mutation, except that I can't quite buy the same mutation happening in the same way on so many ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... asked them, in our later, more intimate conversations, how they accounted for so much divergence without cross-fertilization, they attributed it partly to the careful education, which followed each slight tendency to differ, and partly to the law of mutation. This they had found in their work with plants, and fully ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman

... without influence to me, produced a great revolution among my fellow-prisoners. I lived long enough in the jail to witness a general mutation of its inhabitants. One of the housebreakers (the rival of the Duke of Bedford), and the coiner, were hanged. Two more were cast for transportation, and the rest acquitted. The transports remained ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin



Words linked to "Mutation" :   genetic mutation, deletion, alteration, inversion, reversion, lusus naturae, mutant, biological science, monstrosity, being, change, freak, biology, mutagenesis, point mutation, organism, monster, variation, transposition, modification



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