Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.
A comparison between the triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with the changes in amino acid sequence produced by mutation shows a fair measure of agreement.
The unique nature about the influenza virus is its great potential for changes, for mutation.
Although I insist that God has always had the power to intervene directly in nature to create new forms, I am willing to be per-suaded that He chose not to do so and instead employed secondary natural causes like random mutation and natural selection.
For the first time in history we can track the evolution of a pandemic in real time. Influenza viruses are notorious for their rapid mutation and unpredictable behaviour.
The balance of evidence both from the cell-free system and from the study of mutation, suggests that this does not occur at random, and that triplets coding the same amino acid may well be rather similar.
In microbiology the roles of mutation and selection in evolution are coming to be better understood through the use of bacterial cultures of mutant strains.
Adaption of the human body in space is not yet mastered. As soon as you hit space, you feel your body is going through a period of mutation. There's no blood in your head; you have a hard time swallowing. We're not born to naturally be in space.
If you know the mother's genome and the father's genome, and you see that the children have some genes that neither parent has, then you know that difference is either a mutation or a processing error.
In the comic-book lore, of course, you mutate post a traumatic event. You must have the mutant gene, but if something traumatic happens to you, usually at puberty, then that mutation manifests itself.