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?
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2022
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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.
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 are passed on only has as often as junk dna mutations. The key point is, they proved these mutations do not get passed on and instead get repaired before there is a real chance for natural selection to operate. That's a pretty big deal in itself.
Whether or not histones are the exact mechanism is a little beside the point.
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