can essentially be magnified by the downstream processing. We will look ever so slightly deeper into this set of mechanisms just a bit later.

At this point, we need to note that within higher organisms, including Homo sapiens sapiens, there are two very different classes of cells that go through the replication process: germ cells and somatic cells. The seminal cells of a new organism, the cells that participate in the sexual reproduction process, are termed germ cells. For a single individual within the human species, the point of conception involves the fusion of two germ cells, one from the female and one from the male. These two cells combine to form the first cell of what will become a new person; a zygote. From this cell, which contains a DNA sequence that completely defines how to construct this new person, a series of new cells will derive. So, changes within the DNA sequence of a germ cell, either during the replication process or within the completed zygote prior to further replication, can ultimately be reflected in the construction process of the trillions of newly created cells that directly derive from the zygote in order to form the next generation person. Hence, a change in the initial state of a germ cell or the zygote can result in profound changes in the resulting person. With the completion of germ cell combination, the cell structure transforms into a somatic cell. With the formation of the first somatic cell begins the person construction phase of human replication. From this point, changes to the DNA molecule in any subsequent cell will very likely be constrained to make modifications only in that cell and its descendents; that is, the DNA changes probably won’t be directly conveyed into changes throughout the person.

The DNA replication process of unraveling and reconstruction occurs in discrete sections of the DNA molecule simultaneously. Specific protein molecules attach to the DNA strands at select points in the base pair sequences and become markers that define the sections, while other proteins later remove these markers from the replicated strands when the process is completed. Just as we’ll find later on with computer systems, this parallel processing in the replication mechanism is necessary in order to complete the operation within a time period consistent with other, large-scale operations of the organism. Of course, the evolutionary process actually derived the connection in the inverse order. That is, the timing of larger scale operations, which we can observe externally, followed the timing of the replication process of cells which ultimately enabled all that follows.

As the double helix unwinds, a complementary rail and base structure that is constructed from raw materials found in the cellular interior anneals itself onto each strand from the original DNA molecule. When reconstruction of the individual sections is completed, a final finishing process essentially checks the accuracy of the replication operation. The base error rate for the initial recombination is found to be in the range of one base pair error in approximately every 10,000 base pairs replicated. Subsequent error-correcting mechanisms applied following the initial recombination process serve to lower the effective error rate for the full replication operation to one error in each billion base pairs. With the subsequent fault tolerance of the cell construction from the new and old DNA strands, this low error rate guarantees that cell duplication is a highly reliable process. In the end, two complete DNA molecules are formed, with one going into each of two new cells. Each of these new DNA molecules is a replica of the original DNA molecule, so each new cell now has the same DNA blueprint that was contained in the parent cell. This blueprint determines the function and form of the new cell in (very roughly) the following manner.

The sequence of base pairs found in the DNA molecule determines a code that is translated through cellular chemistry into the construction of highly specialized proteins at various points within a cell. Essentially, a monorail molecule analogous to DNA, termed RNA (Ribonucleic

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