Originally posted by Remulous
what causes mutation,what did apes evolve from?
Mutation is caused by several reasons, sometimes random, like when a person is born with extremely long toes even though neither parent has the trait and as I said above, there's very interesting work being done now on viruses affecting mutation/evolution.
You probably didn't read an older post of mine but I'll recap it... There's a small percentage of the human population that is immune to HIV/AIDS, these people carry a defective chromosome (CCR-5); though it doesn't cause any major harm to the person this defective gene in turn makes the person carrying it immune to HIV/AIDS and other plagues.
There is proof that this defective gene was caused by the bubonic plague that wiped out about a 1/5 (or more?) of the European population. Now, those people that 'evolved/mutated' this defection would have survived the plague and passed on their genetic code to their offspring which in turn would have had the same protection. That's called evolution. A simplistic explanation, but there you go.
In theory if the plague was not stopped and it kept on killing people year after year eon after eon on a global scale; eventually the entire human race would be carrying this gene since the people that have it would have a much higher chance of survival and in turn their children would survive if they inherited the gene defection.