Mutation

Genetic variation, the essential raw material that natural selection acts on during evolution, is generated by two distinct processes working together: recombination, covered in the preceding sections, which reshuffles existing alleles into new combinations, and mutation, which is a sudden, heritable change in the genetic material itself, creating alleles that did not exist before. Hugo de Vries coined the term 'mutation' in 1901 during his studies of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, and went on to propose a formal Mutation Theory of evolution based on those observations. Broadly, changes to the genetic material fall into two categories depending on their scale: point mutations, which alter one gene …