Answer: The short answer is, you could look at it as a bad or a good thing. I’ll explain. If you look at the advances in medicine from, say, 1901 to 2021, you could probably answer your question. Medicine hasn’t stopped all mutations (yet), but the fact is, we are definitely changing the course of natural selection. Take a person diagnosed with benign congenital skin cancer. 100 years ago, that could have been a death sentence, because though surgeons may try to remove the mass, there was not a good enough understanding of microscopic organisms for the prognosis of surgery to be very desirable because of infections. With modern surgery, this person with skin cancer could have the cancerous cells excised in a sterile environment and live on. So even though we haven't removed the cancerous mutation, in a way we have done something equivalent: we've removed its negative effect on the person’s body. It could be argued that this is a bad thing; we are allowing that cancer gene to propagate into later generations if the person with the now-excised cancer was to have a child. There are also worries in the media about an aging population, which has been purported to have a potential doomsday outcome. But for obvious reasons, the ability to remove a tumor without infection is also a good thing. So, medicine could be considered either good or bad or both. Extending that, if you agree that removing a gene’s negative effect is similar to removing the gene itself, then having a mutation-free world would be either good or bad or both.
Following this, if there were no mutations at all, I actually don't think the changes would be any more drastic than the changes we have seen resulting from modern medicine. A lack of genetic disorders would not end death, remember, there would still be death from things like traumatic injury and heart disease. Also keep in mind that in a mutation-free world, biodiversity would be preserved because of meiosis.
So I suppose whether an absence of mutations is good or bad depends on how much weight you give to worries of an aging population because of modern medicine versus how much you appreciate the security of a longer and healthier life for you and your family.
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Kyle Taylor
Founder at The Penny Hoarder (2010–present)Updated Sun
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