Wild-type humans
Wild-type is the term geneticists use to refer to non-mutants. It literally means organisms that are the same, genetically, as those in the wild, compared to ones that have been grown under coddled conditions in the lab for generations, going soft in the absence of natural selection, or that are specifically mutant at some gene or other. There are no wild-type humans. Well, maybe there are a few, somewhere, but even they are not really non-mutants. We all carry millions of mutations in our genome – positions where the sequence in our genome differs from the typical sequence. Where everyone else has a “T”, you might have an “A”, for example. Most of these mutations have no consequence – they are simply neutral variation in DNA that has no discernible function. It turns out that most of the genome is not made of genes – the bits of DNA that code for proteins actually comprise only about 2-3% of the total sequence. Mutations that change the code for proteins are by far the most li...