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It makes sense that organisms would evolve to prevent random mutations in DNA that’s critical to the survival of the organism.
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Sure, there can be different effective strategies here. On the other hand, natural selection would favor plants that can spread as many viable seeds as possible. So, you also have a selection pressure to ensure that a large number of seeds takes root. Meanwhile, additional energy cost is only a constraint assuming the plant is getting just enough energy to get by.
Isn’t that just survival bias?
Well, no. If they had not performed the largest Arabidopsis mutation accumulation experiment in history and had not carefully tracked all mutations occurring across a population of thousands of plants growing in controlled conditions across multiple generations, you might be able to argue survivor bias.
They demonstrated that germline mutations that affect actual functional proteins are passed on only has as often as junk dna mutations. The key point is, they proved these mutations do not get passed on and instead get repaired before there is a real chance for natural selection to operate. That’s a pretty big deal in itself.
Whether or not histones are the exact mechanism is a little beside the point.
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There’s a link to Nature at the bottom of the article but its full of wierd redirects. Here is the actual (open acess) article I think https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04269-6
yes, the article has a link to the paper at the very, very end with all the deets: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04269-6
Maybe a sign of some kind of coordination of the traits of progeny by organisms? Like, they have some mechanism to actively determine what genes would be better for survival?
