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Mutation   /mjutˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Mutation

noun
1.
(biology) an organism that has characteristics resulting from chromosomal alteration.  Synonyms: mutant, sport, variation.
2.
(genetics) any event that changes genetic structure; any alteration in the inherited nucleic acid sequence of the genotype of an organism.  Synonyms: chromosomal mutation, genetic mutation.
3.
A change or alteration in form or qualities.



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"Mutation" Quotes from Famous Books



... wider geographical distribution, and passed through a longer term of time, and through more extreme changes of climatal conditions, than the mammoth. If species are so unstable, and so susceptible of mutation through such influences, why does that extinct form stand out so signally a monument of stability? By his admirable researches and earnest writings, Darwin has, beyond all his contemporaries, given an impulse to the philosophical investigation of the most ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... father. It was not until "Young Ed" had reached his full manhood that his defects had become recognizable evil tendencies, that his infirmity had developed into a disease. Like sleeping cancers, the Austin vices had lain dormant in him during boyhood; it had required the mutation from youth to manhood, and the alterative effect of marriage, to rouse them; but, once awakened, their ravages had been swift and destructive. Ed's marriage to Alaire had been inevitable. They had been playmates, and their parents had considered the union a consummation of their own lifelong friendship. ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... 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 ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... took their new name from a place or circumstance calculated to preserve the memory of their origin; thus the Agolanti designated themselves Fiesolani, the Bostichi from the antiquity of their stock, Buonantichi. In mutation of arms a similar object was borne in mind. Thus the Buondelmonti simply added to their ancient bearings a mountain az. and a cross gu. The Baccelli, who were a branch of the Mazzinghi, replaced the three perpendicular clubs, the ancient ensigns of the family, by two placed in the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various

... the state of this poor kingdom, from evil counsellors who have abused her royal nature in time past, hath determined to sequestrate herself from state affairs in future. But it is our duty, as acting for and in the name of our infant nephew, to guard against the evils which may arise from any mutation or vacillation in her royal resolutions. Wherefore, it will be thy duty to watch, and report to our lady mother, whose guest our sister is for the present, whatever may infer a disposition to withdraw her ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... by the greatest moral earthquake that ever convulsed and shattered this globe of ours. My Lords, it has pleased Providence to place us in such a state that we appear every moment to be on the verge of some great mutations. There is one thing, and one thing only, which defies all mutation; that which existed before the world, and will survive the fabric of the world itself,—I mean justice; that justice which, emanating from the Divinity, has a place in the breast of every one of us, given ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... when all the Mixture work is drawn, is well nigh ludicrous to modern ears, and it is hard to suppress a smile when reading the statements and arguments advanced in favor of the retention of Mixtures by well-known organists of the last generation. These mutation stops still have their place in large instruments, but it is no longer thought that they are necessary to support the singing of a congregation and that they should be voiced loudly. The decline of Mixture ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller

... close our picturings of the Rocky Mountains and their wild inhabitants, and of the wild life that prevails there; which we have been anxious to fix on record, because we are aware that this singular state of things is full of mutation, and must soon undergo great changes, if not entirely pass away. The fur trade itself, which has given life to all this portraiture, is essentially evanescent. Rival parties of trappers soon exhaust the streams, especially when competition renders them heedless and wasteful of the beaver. ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving

... to astronomy are several, among others the determination of the mutation of the axis of the earth. He also determined the ratio of the attractive forces of the sun and moon, which he found to be about as seven to three. From this he reached the conclusion that the earth must be seventy times greater than the moon. The first two volumes of his ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... it (the chapel), which they had been so well acquainted with, they found it so altered and transformed, all inscriptions and those landmarks pulled down, by which all men knew every particular place in that church, and such a dismal mutation over the whole that they knew not where they where; nor was there one old officer that had belonged to it, or knew where our Princes had used to be interred. At last there was a fellow of the town who undertook ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various

... air, as countryes know, Their joyning fighting, forcing and retreat, That earth appears in heaven, O wonder great! Sometimes red flaming swords and blazing stars, Portentous signs of famines, plagues and wars, Which make the Monarchs fear their fates By death or great mutation of their States. I have said less than did my Sisters three, But what's their wrath or force, the fame's in me. To adde to all I've said was my intent, But dare not go ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... which we dwell here—of a body 'raised in incorruption,' 'clothed with immortality,' and so, as in many another phrase, declared to be exempt from decay, and therefore vigorous with unchanging youth. How that comes we cannot tell. Whether because that body of glory has no proclivity to mutation and decay, or whether the perpetual volition and power of God counteract such tendency and give, as the Book of Revelation says,' to eat of the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God'—matters not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... next morning in time to sit down with the family to breakfast. More than three years had intervened—almost without mutation in that stationary household—since I had sat there first, a young American freshman, bewildered among unfamiliar dainties (Finnan haddock, kippered salmon, baps, and mutton-ham), and had wearied my mind in vain to guess what ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... against the expression of these instinct motives, the human organism is fully and efficiently prepared for a tenacious and destructive revolt against this environment; and if the antagonism persist, the organism is ready to destroy itself and disappear as a species if it fail of a psychical mutation which would make ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... the mutation of Colours by Saline menstruums, they have already been so fully and excellently handled by the lately mention'd Incomparable Authour, that I can add nothing, but that of a multitude of trials that I made, I have found them exactly to agree ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke

... should be laid on the point. But the mere fact that RETROGRESSIVE variation in mentality is GRADED favors the view that its PROGRESSIVE evolution has been gradual, rather than the view that it has arisen by mutation or sudden loss of inhibitors. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... of reaching the first rung of the ladder which I used to think I would have climbed by this time. But yes, I have been back there recently, and found everything changed. In fact, the West is a symbol of mutation. The marshlands have been filled in; streets extend across the places where I used to go for cat-tails; they have no more batrachian concerts there now. The only reminder of that earlier characteristic of the place is a huge green frog worked out in a marble mosaic ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... bought on credit. There were better clothes to be seen in its one long straggling street, but those who wore them generally lacked the grim virtue of the old pioneers, and the fairer faces that were to be seen were generally rouged. There was a year or two of this kind of mutation, in which the youthful barbarism of Rough and Ready might have been said to struggle with adult civilized wickedness, and then the name itself disappeared. By an Act of the Legislature the growing town was called "Atherly," after ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte

... attendeth. Consider in whose chambers your council must sit, and to whom for resolutions they must resort; and let these things determine both what was the purpose indeed, and hidden intention of that change of religion, and who hath gathered the benefits of that mutation: that is to say, whether for your Q., for your realms, or for their own sakes, the same at first was taken in hand, and since pursued as you have seen. For according to the principal effects of ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... ecliptica media or his via regia of the sun, vnto wch the walke of al the other planets is obliqj more or lesse; even the ecliptica uera under wch the earth walkes his yeares journie; by wch he solues handsomelie the mutation of the starres latitudes. Indeed I am much delighted with his booke, but he is so tough in rnanie places as I cannot bite him. I pray write me some instructions in your next, how I may deale with him to ouermaster him for I am readie to take paines, te modo jura ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens

... 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 ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... views from our solar system to other systems—other suns and revolving planets—it is fair to conclude that they are not less perfect in arrangement—subject to like conditions of permanency, and alike exempt from mutation, decay, ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... Western agricultural colleges and Government Experiment Stations, Professor Buffum chose his present location because nowhere in the United States could he find conditions of soil and climate that induce to such a remarkable degree the breaking up of species, and mutation or "sporting" ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... not know. Follow the world and in that hour when you have obeyed its dictates and learned its wants—its taste will change and leave you nothing. That which the many have chosen is of the many. The voice of the many is not the voice of God—it is the voice of the temporal and its destiny is swift mutation. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than a town? Ask nothing of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... that sphere which influences and governs everything below, or that the proper abode of beings at once so illustrious and permanent should be in that part of Nature in which they had always observed the greatest splendor and the least mutation. But on ordinary occasions it was natural some should imagine that the dead retired into a remote country, separated from the living by seas or mountains. It was natural that some should follow their imagination with a simplicity ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... find a couple of explanations that I would rather explore first, before dragging in an alien life form. There may have been a mutation or an inherited disease that has deformed ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... about terms of "mutation," etc.; I had some suspicions that it was not quite correct, and yet I do not see my way to arrive at any better terms. It will be years before I publish, so that I shall have plenty of time to think of better words. Development would perhaps do, only it is applied ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... 19th of July, our captain returned to the ship with good news of great riches, which showed itself in the bowels of those barren mountains, wherewith we were all satisfied. A sudden mutation. The one part of us being almost swallowed up the night before, with cruel Neptune's force, and the rest on shore, taking thought for their greedy paunches how to find the way to Newfoundland; at one moment we were ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt

... of the University of Strasburg, who insists that species are only relatively stable, admits that they remain persistent as long as they exist under the same external conditions. Time is, therefore, not a factor in the mutation of species. Nor are environing conditions factors, except as a failure of conditions results in the disappearance of species, as the presence of conditions results in ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... the Soul leads us to realize ourselves and all life as of the Soul; that, as we dwell, not in past, present or future, but in the Eternal, we become more at one with the Eternal; that, as we view all organization, preservation, mutation as the work of the Divine One, we shall come more into harmony with the One, and thus remove the barrier' in our path toward ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston

... occasioned by the embarrassing nature of the sonnet: a form of composition I do not love, and which is almost intolerable in any language but Italian, which furnishes such a profusion of rhymes. To our tongue the sonnet is mortal, and the parent of insipidity. The Mutation in some degree of it was extremely noxious to a true poet, our Spenser; and he was the more injudicious by lengthening his stanza in a language so barren of rhymes as ours, and in which several words, whose terminations are of similar sounds, are ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts or of sciences or of literature or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of the dead sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... the universal, and never spares individuals, but uses them as means for the accomplishment of her ends. It is, therefore, for us to submit to Destiny, cultivating, as the things necessary to virtue, knowledge, temperance, fortitude, justice. We must remember that every thing around us is in mutation; decay follows reproduction, and reproduction decay, and that it is useless to repine at death in a world where every thing is dying. As a cataract shows from year to year an invariable shape, though the water composing it is ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... how to do this, by means of a furnace, so made as to imitate the warmth of a sitting hen. In which you may lay several eggs to hatch and by breaking them at several ages, you may distinctly observe every hourly mutation in them, if you please. The first will be, that on one side you shall find a great resplendent clearness in the white. After a while, a little spot of red matter, like blood will appear in the midst ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 36. Saturday, July 6, 1850 • Various

... living and extinct inhabitants of the world, and at each successive 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 Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... remarkable difference distinguishes the modern world from all that went before than its attitude toward change itself. The medieval world idealized changelessness. Its very astronomy was the apotheosis of the unalterable. The earth, a globe full of mutation and decay; around it eight transparent spheres carrying the heavenly bodies, each outer sphere moving more slowly than its inner neighbour, while the ninth, moving most slowly of all, moved all the rest; last ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... reacheth to the clouds.' Strange that God's fixed faithfulness should be compared to the very emblems of mutation. The clouds are unstable, they whirl and melt and change. Strange to think of the unalterable faithfulness as reaching to them! May it not be that the very mutability of the mutable may be the means of manifesting the unalterable sameness ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... meanings as there are speakers of them. All things are in revolution; in change from moment to moment, which becomes sensible from epoch to epoch: in this Time-World of ours there is properly nothing else but revolution and mutation, and even nothing else conceivable. Revolution, you answer, means speedier change. Whereupon one has still to ask: How speedy? At what degree of speed; in what particular points of this variable course, which varies in ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... commonly called sports. Let us illustrate: In the giraffe of our former forest, one might appear whose neck was not longer because of slightly longer vertebrae, but who possessed an extra vertebrae. This would be a mutation. In other words, a mutation is a marked variation that may be inherited. We now believe that polled cattle, five-toed Dorkings, top-knotted Houdans, frizzles and black ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings

... backwater; the triumphant party hardly cared to notice that a Liberal candidate had scored an unprecedented proportion of votes. Welwyn-Baker sat on, stolidly oblivious of the change that was affecting his constituency, denying indeed the possibility of mutation in human things. Yet even now the Literary Institute was passing into the hands of people who aimed at making it something more than a place where retired tradesmen could play draughts and doze over Good Words; already had offensive volumes found harbourage on ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing

... finds you off your guard. I was sure, in your calm way, you would be prepared for sudden mutation. I always think you stand in the world like a solitary but watchful, thoughtful archer in a wood. And the quiver on your shoulder holds more arrows than one; your bow is provided with a second string. Such too is your brother's wont. You two might go forth homeless hunters to the loneliest ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... agree that we only differ in DEGREE about the means of dispersal, and that I think a satisfactory amount of accordance. You put in a very striking manner the mutation of our continents, and I quite agree; I doubt only about ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... that which I have described be the most desirable state of society or no, it is certain that it can not continue. Mutation and progress is the condition of human affairs. Though retarded for a time by extraneous or accidental circumstances, the wheel must roll on. The tendency of population is to become crowded, increasing the difficulty of obtaining subsistence. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various



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



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