Intermutation

Schnabl, Stadler, Frost, and Schuster recently showed that error, expressed as mutual intermutation between reactive molecular species significantly affects the ability of a system to bifurcate into complex, chaotic oscillations.

Although Plato follows his pre-Socratic predecessors in their attempt to bring the four element theory into greater accord with empirical phenomena and agrees with them that these bodies are transformed one into the other, his general theory, unfortunately, does not allow him to account for the intermutation of all four of these primary bodies. His failure to incorporate earth within the cycle of intermutation leads him to suggest that its transformation is purely illusory.

Most mutations in this genome have an intermutation distance of about 10⁵ bp to about 10⁶ bp, but the plot clearly shows a major region of hypermutation roughly centered on mutation position 4000 (corresponding to a 14 Mb region on the long arm of chromosome 6), where there is an extraodinary cluster of C • T mutations (red dots) that are spaced from their nearest neighbors by very short distances (often 100 bp or less).