At least I didn't accuse Carl Zimmer of doing this. As Rebecca Skloot points out, we shouldn't blame the science writers for this. It's those damn editors that don't understand science. By the way, I hate the creators of X-Men for damaging the public's understanding of genetic mutations.
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Speaking as a journalism major, the only way we can control the number of idiot editors is by offering government grants paying them to drink themselves to death. The worst editors are already on their way, but they're generally too cheap to finish the job unless someone else pays their way. (This isn't always true: a weekly newspaper assistant editor for whom I worked was such a horrendous cokehead that four dealers in town wouldn't be able to send their grandkids to Harvard if he ever decided to go on the wagon.)
Speaking as someone who started working life in a subeditorial room of a major metropolitan newspaper (I was neither mild, mannered nor a newspaper reporter; just the copy boy) I can tell you that no such government grants are required - they do it by themselves. But there are always more journalists waiting to take up the glasses.
The X-men mutant meme predates Marvel comics by several decades. You'll find it in bad science fiction of the 30s and 40s.
What are these 30s or 40s you're talk of? As a member of generation Y, I can confidently say that nothing prior to 1980 existed.