How Many Mutations Occur?

Fixation of Mutations

Mutation rates vary greatly between organisms:

Viruses have very high mutation rates, about 1 mutation per 10,000 nucleotides per infection cycle.
Humans have much lower mutation rates, about 1 mutation per 30–40 million nucleotides.

Despite this low rate, humans pass approximately 100–200 new mutations to each child because of the large size of the human genome (Strachan & Read, 2018).