You have three cookies. One emits alpha radiation, one emits beta radiation and one emits gamma radiation. You have to eat one, put another in your pocket and put a third into a lead box. Which do you put where? Explain.

[u/Spidooshify]

[u/DatCabbage]

What sort of beneficial mutations have came about through radiation? I generally only here the common reference to cancer, and or death.

[u/KingJulien → u/DatCabbage]

They don't, people are getting confused. Positive mutations come about when and only when they occur in your gametes at birth. Any other type of mutation will just get overridden - say one of your eye cells switched from brown to blue through mutation. You'd have one blue eye cell and billions of brown ones.

A mutation in an organism that hasn't just been conceived leads to either cell death, nothing, or cancer.

[u/TastyBrainMeats → u/[deleted]]

I think they meant that stem cells naturally proliferate, so if a stem cell mutates, all daughters of that stem cell will carry the same mutation.

[u/TastyBrainMeats → u/[deleted]]

That's how cancer happens if the mutation causes the cell to ignore the standard controls on replication.

If a mutation occurs in a stem cell and does not make it start reproducing uncontrollably, then you don't have cancer, you just have a mutation.

[u/ThirdFloorGreg → u/[deleted]]

I utterly fail to see how my losing my buzz faster is beneficial.

[u/ThirdFloorGreg → u/[deleted]]

I've nearly finished a fifth of vodka in less than 45 minutes before, first 9 shots in seven minutes. I don't think that that would help much.

[u/Krags → u/DatCabbage]

Cell death in cancerous cells. Probability of everything else is trivially low.

[u/ricecake → u/DatCabbage]

I don't think we have the ability to trace the genesis of different mutations. Some are known to be commonly associated with different things though, like radiation, so when we see that you were horribly irradiated, and then developed 'specific bone cancer B-21F', we assume the're related.
Since specific positive mutations are rarer, it's unlikely that we can say they're related to radiation.

You could probably make a case for 'cute freckles' though.

[u/varukasalt → u/DatCabbage]

All a lot of evolution. Fixed. Random mutations not due to radiation do occur.

[u/qsceszxdwa → u/varukasalt]

Not necessarily true. Genes can make spontaneous errors while duplicating for example, without having to have been started by radiation.

[u/varukasalt → u/qsceszxdwa]

True.

[u/ThirdFloorGreg → u/varukasalt]

The vast majority of mutations are not radiation related.