First Class Mutations

Beasts on a plane!

It almost feels like a fool’s errand to isolate something that can help us make light of ourselves from the litany of improbable happenings taking place in X-Men: First Class. Any film with a sapphire coloured beast piloting a stealth fighter jet will struggle to poignantly frame questions about the evolution of humanity. But if you squint a little, the band of ‘mutant’ heroes, whose variety of supernatural traits are powered by a single mutation in the fictitious ‘X gene’, actually epitomise a core mechanism central to the field of population genetics.

In reality (and not the realm of Marvel comics), mutations are small changes that occur in the DNA sequence stored in all the cells of our bodies. Everyone—Lil Wayne, the Pope and Angelina Jolie not excepting— is subject to their mutations: these accrue naturally in populations over generations as DNA is copied with very rare and slight inaccuracies when men and women make the sperm and egg cells (respectively) which give rise to offspring.

The novel mutations that you’re born with are not your lot though. Mutations can also be induced in adult cells through exposure to various factors as we live our lives, including radiation and certain types of viruses. Before you wildly panic and try to throw your smoke detector out of the window (yes, that’s a tad radioactive), it’s worth noting that the overwhelming majority of mutations that we experience are completely redundant, since they fall in the vast expanses of our DNA which are seemingly junk and do not code the production of proteins; the molecules which we use for body composition and in the function of all our metabolic processes. And even if mutations fall in the middle of genes—the stretches of DNA which do give rise to proteins—these can cause absolutely no effect on what is produced. These are synonymous mutations; they change coding DNA sequence, but not in a manner that results in differences to the protein products that are expected.

However, there are occasionally some big hitting genetic changes: non-synonymous mutations which occur in genes and either shut down protein production or cause a different protein to be produced.  These differences subsequently alter the biochemistry of our bodies, and ultimately how we interact with the world. Sometimes these can have drastic effects; for example, point mutations (where a single letter of the DNA code is changed) can result in big disorders such as achondroplasia, a common form of dwarfism.  

Despite the prospect of detrimental genetic mutations, not all change is bad. Mutations also bolster variation in a population, and when in a fluidly volatile world like ours, variation gives rise to individuals who may be better adapted to their given environments than others. In essence, mutations can offer comparative advantages to individuals, which allow them to thrive more than their neighbours and so reproduce more. By this process of natural selection acting over huge numbers of generations, certain mutations can lead to the appearance of defining characteristics of a species.

So how does this relate to whiskered Roquefort being able to fly a plane? Clearly the idea of one mutation giving rise to the multitude of godly abilities that the various X-Men possess is ridiculous. It has taken 500 million years of accumulated mutations to get us from our mud-skimming ancestry to the point where, as humanity, we can collectively hold a biro.

The Original X-Men

In the impatient world of comics though, the concept of mutations was instantly empowering. In the early 1960s, two of the industry’s deities, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, mined the science of genetics to come up with mutants, and thus solved the comic writer’s long running headache of having to document a story of origin for each of the burgeoning number of superheroes. Each new character was born with inherent ‘gifts’, rather than requiring long back stories about cosmic or industrial accidents giving rise to their powers. Even in the world of comics, there can only plausibly be so many radioactive spiders crawling about.

In the long history of the X-Men, mutants have been used as parables for complex social issues such as racial discrimination, and read by many generations of children. But in caricatural terms, they also embody the brilliant power that mutations have in the formation of all the strange and wonderful life that exists on Earth. In the real world, perceptible effects of mutations usually just take a while longer to be seen across a species than the period it takes for a comic writer’s conception to make it to dye on the pulp.