The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan American fact tank based in Washington, D.C. It provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. It also conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis, and other empirical social science research.
PRC is one view and a view that is biased towards
social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends. It looks for facts of how public opinion and trends affect society. What it doesn't do is conduct science validation for the sake of accuracy of the science but how people in society react to it.
Life on Earth is around 4 billion years old. There are many more than 60 generations of mutations. Bacteria is one of the most prolific forms of life on this planet. Observation of 60 generations is not long enough to determine if
natural mutation occurs. There is also the possibility that within those 60 generations, natural mutation is occurring but our technology can't detect those changes because they are so insignificant.
What is significant is that we can change the environment and
cause unnatural mutation within 60 generations. The fact that a mutation can be caused proves that mutation can occur.
The four nitrogen bases found in DNA are adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine.
First significance is the word
Nitrogen.
The Earth's atmosphere is composed of the following molecules: nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), argon (1%), and then trace amounts of carbon dioxide, neon, helium, methane, krypton, hydrogen, nitrous oxide, xenon, ozone, iodine, carbon monoxide, and ammonia. Lower altitudes also have quantities of water vapor.
This is significant because most of the life on this planet exists in the atmosphere.
There are non-atmosphere dwelling lifeforms on this planet as well.
We call these lifeforms anaerobic.
Of DNA, we share most of our sequence with other nitrogen based life.
DNA sequences is different but only certain parts are unique to us.
While the information in DNA is immense and complex, it is this complexity that increases the likelihood of mutations occurring.
Additionally, mapping the human genome or any genome is relatively new science. It is baseline mapping, not specific mapping.
There hasn't been time to map exact sequencing of multiple generations of a single human. Plus, mapping one human's generational mutations would only give information on that specific human and its subsequent generations.
To have significance, each type of human pair would need to be mapped and every pair of every generation for each type would have to be mapped. Then each test subject would have to be monitored in a baseline environment with exactly the same conditions.
Which means, each test subject would need to be an example of race (Caucasian, Oriental, etc...). Their test mate would also need to be considered (Caucasian-Caucasian, Oriental-Oriental, Caucasian-Oriental, Etc...) Each mating would need to be timed to age (maturity) of both genetic donors. Each zygote would need to be paired with the same type zygote, generation by generation.
Environmental factors would need to be exactly the same for the pristine subjects and their offspring. This means the same temperature, same stress, same foods, sleep patterns and so on.
The importance of determining changes requires that the testing controls everything except that which is being tested. Failure of conclusion in most experiments is usually due to failure to maintain control factors in testing.
In determining if mutations occur naturally the test process must be maintained over multiple generations with no deviation, otherwise the data collected has no significance. 60 generations could be significant as long as the control factors are precisely maintained for each generation.
It also matters how specific the data is chosen. In other words, if they are looking at specific data from the pristine subject, are they looking for exactly the same data from each resultant generation?
Did they choose the correct data to determine the validity of their hypothesis?
Natural mutation occurs over time due to changes in environmental conditions.
In the testing for mutations, the control of environment will stifle mutation. This will yield results of minimal or no mutation.
In this case, the control measures affect the results.
If an organism has no need to change, it will not mutate.
If an organism has no need to evolve, it will remain the same.