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Asked by Gabe to Daniel, Amy on 5 Jan 2020.
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Amy Mason answered on 5 Jan 2020:
I can’t put a number on this without doing much more research, but I do know that
– Mutations happen all the time in our body due to errors in cell copying. Most of these are harmless and unnoticeable. Sometimes they aren’t harmless and cause rapid cell growth, which becomes a tumour and can make you very ill.
– the difference between species is much larger than a single change to your DNA. There are millions of differences in DNA between you and me, but we are the same species (I assume!)
– So you would need either a lot of changes or one giant change altering a lot of your DNA (bitten by radioactive comicbook spider?). At which point, there is a more worrying question – are you still you, if that much of your DNA has changed?
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Comments
Diana commented on :
No one indivdual forms a species. Hence ZERO. Even a large number of mutations won’t make a new species. Mutation would need to be in sperm or egg. Men regularly make new sperm, but the mutation would need to be the lucky one that fertilized the egg. If it was a sperm generator then there might be many sperm with mutation, but the next batch of sperm might mnot have mutation! Women already have all their eggs when they are born, but of course one might still acquire mutation – and be the lucky one to get fertilised.
Generation of new species is very complicated and usually requires isolation for amny generations in hostile envrironment. Formation of sub-species [races] is quite common in that different human races have a different spread if genes. E.g. people who live in high mountains have different oxygen carrying capacity, but they easily mate an produce offspring with members of races from sea level, so new species are not develope . Humans are just one species, with moderate diversity – other species may be more diverse [have geater spread of gene versions]