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Darwinian Evolution Considered As a Phase
LucidBeast tips a mind-bending report at New Scientist on the latest paradigm-breaking work of Carl Woese, one of whose earlier discoveries was the third branch of life on Earth, the Archaea. Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld argue that, even in its sophisticated modern form, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection applies only to a recent phase of life on Earth. Woese and Goldenfeld believe that horizontal evolution led to the rise of the genetic code itself. "At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer — in which organisms acquire genetic material 'horizontally' from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself."
I strongly suspect it isn't, nor was it ever, one type of evolution over the other, but a complex interaction between many environmental pressures where both types of evolution played a role.
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
The first 2 parts of Spore are like Horizontal Evolution, and the later parts are all vertical.
It makes perfect sense. Clearly Will Wright is a genius.
This would be epigenetic, neo-Lamarkian evolution, with the inheritance of acquired traits.
Not: Larkian evolution is NOT Lysenkoian evolution.
For anyone familiar with the Red Queen Hypothesis ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen ) this should be obvious.
While direct DNA transfer is not the component usually referred to by this "arms race," it is merely an extension of a known theory.
No one makes a big hype about this theory, because it doesn't say your grandfather was a monkey and piss off the religious nuts
So, would this "horizontal gene transfer" be like capitalism? Does it become a battle to see who can acquire the most and/or the best genes? Do you end up with winners for a while, until the losers get disgusted and start sparking genetic revolutions? Would Darwinian revolution be a happy meritocracy that arose as a kind of "compromise"?
However, I've always read Darwinian evolution as "survival of the fittest", with no qualifier as to how you go about surviving. It always implied to me that the organisms (as defined by its genetic code) were what did the surviving. If organisms enhance their survival by acquiring genes through means other than sex, this doesn't seem non Darwinian to me. It just seems like a deeper understanding of evolution.
The more intriguing possibility, with serious impliations for us humans, is "intentional evolution". In other words, organisms purposefully manipulating their own genes. That actually might be considered a radical enough change to give it a new name: Recursive Evolution.
I guess you could push horizontal genetic flow with viruses in the higher organisms, like us. In general however, horizontal genetic flow occurs between plants and bacteria because they have the molecular mechanisims for it. If anything it would suggest horizontal genetic flow was the first stage of evolution, with classic evolution taking over more so as time moved forward since higher organisms have a higher need to maintain genetic continuity due to specific and more complicated form. For instance you have chromosomal ploidy in plants because they follow a different evolutionary strategy: stay in place, but grow as much as possible to aquire resources. In this case genetic diversity may help. In the ambultory mammal however, it wants to retain a very specific morphology to keep doing what it does, therefore it maintains a more rigid genetic control and linear evolution.
"Men willingly believe what they wish." - Julius Caesar
You know, scientists just keep reforming their ideas until it conforms to observable reality. How can they expect anyone to believe what they say when they're just going to keep changing their minds?
I prefer my religion. It allows me to conform reality to my ideas.
I pass on my genes horizontally
Watch those corners
So does this explain why you can stick "random" genes into a completely different organism and gain traits that wouldn't arise normally? This seems like it'll be very useful in GE if the mechanics of it are explored more.
This really isn't entirely new; Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene is based around the idea that it's individual genes that are selected for, not organisms.
I am going to come over there and take all your stuff and I'm going to kill you and take your weapons and use them for myself!!!
If you're really nice and sweet I'll beat the crap out of you and then stick you in my kitchen to make food for me.
The second is referring to mitochondria not kitchen bitches.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
. . . you're better off doing it vertically.
Wearing running shoes.
And ideally permission of the farmer.
(beat)
What?
We've already known that evolution depends on both inheritance of genetic matter and mutation of genetic matter. This is a third mechanism for generating traits, but it stills falls under the umbrella of natural selection. If the change is beneficial, and leads to more offspring, the change will be selected for. Certainly worth study, and we may not have known the full scope of the phenomena, but it doesn't really contradict Darwinian evolution at all.
As a side note... I wonder if the fact this occurs in nature will silence some of the people objecting to genetic splicing?
I've always felt that viruses might be the driving force in evolution; they are very good at taking genes from one organism and splicing them into another. Also, one of the first traits that would have evolved after the split into two sexes would have been the ability to choose mates with traits complementary to your own, thus for higher species there is actually some intelligence driving evolution forward.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
From TFA : Suppose that a process he never wrote about, and never even imagined, has been controlling the evolution of life throughout most of the Earth's history
Intelligent Design?
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
You're not nearly adventurous enough, young lad!
Then again.. I've always thought the guy who's getting it on standing upright in his Corvette convertible is destined for a Darwin Award, so there might be something to this story
Cross-species genetic transfer? Like on Avatar, right?
One of the issues I've been thinking a lot about lately is the psychological principle of certainty. When you say "...scientists just keep reforming their ideas until it conforms to observable reality. How can they expect anyone to believe what they say when they're just going to keep changing their minds?" you hit upon something important: certainty of belief. How can the average layperson trust scientific opinion when said scientific opinion says "This is FACT... until it's not"? People require certainty of belief in order to operate. They have to know that gravity means you're pulled down, the sun will rise in the east, that the Bernoulli theorem will always work when they're flying. They incorporate these facts into their daily operation and worldview.
So when scientists say "X is true" and then come along several years later and say "No, we were wrong, Y is true" and then come along several years alter and say "Both X and Y were wrong, now Z is true", the average person cannot count on the certainty of X, Y, or Z, or that the scientists are correct. Regardless of the fact that most citizens are taught the scientific process in school, most of them don't retain it because it has little to no impact on their daily lives (they take for granted the progress we've made). And thus, we get people who deny global climate change, or that we walked on the moon, or that vaccines work.
Here on /., we all argue over these topics and for the most part, we understand the scientific process (whether we agree with its findings is a whole other story). We may argue, fight, and haggle, but eventually we do reach a consensus. However, the average citizen never does, and I think that's why we have so much skepticism towards evolution, or climate change, or space flight, or vaccines, or science in general, and why so many choose to cling to organized religion (Up until Vatican II for instance, Catholic dogma had not changed much since the seventh century - that's pretty damn static).
I hope you don't mind me airing my opinion here. I just thought you raised a really interesting point and wanted to call some attention to it. We on /. tend to forget that most of the world's population has no idea what Science is: to them, scientific progress is indistinguishable from magic.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
For those who do not care to register for that New Scientist, we still have arXiv... :)
http://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0702015
Paul B.
The notion that life probably started by weak, stochastic replication of families of similar molecules.
By weak, is meant that the replication of the molecule/structure is more imperfect from generation to generation
than in present day life, and so a class of similar molecules (life codes) is being continued through time
rather than a singular particular molecule (same genome).
If this origin theory were true, we would expect the replication capability (continued recreation of imperfect but still somewhat replication-capable molecules)
to be robust to change of DNA/RNA even today.
By stochastic, is meant that such imperfect replication is likely to only be stochastically successful in a huge population of the
initially highly approximate (i.e. weak) replicator molecules.
In other words, we would not expect this proto-life to be as reliable at being able to continue (or to always reliably grow by recruiting
surrounding matter into high-fidelity copies.)
So we might expect these proto-life molecule soups to initially just contain in some regions higher than expected probabilities,
stochastically, from time to time, of weak-replicator molecule classes.
Perhaps there is a binary threshold of replication probability and fidelity at which the process self-sustains reliably in the
generality of environment it finds itself in. Life catches fire, and cannot easily be stopped at its matter and energy recruitment
game from that point on.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I mean, explain this.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Here's a tip, folks. The minute you see some science journalist use the word "paradigm", as in "paradigm shift" or "paradigm breaking" you can be quite certain that what follows will be neither.
Horizontal gene transfer has been known about for decades, and the notion that the root of the tree of life is more a tangle of interconnecting branches has pretty much been accepted for some time now. We know that particularly with prokaryotes, horizontal transfer happens, and that while more difficult with eukaryotes, can still happen (ie. endo-retroviral insertions). It is yet another facet of evolution, not some independent force.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's interesting that infectious viruses may form an essential foundation for our own evolution. It may even be that viruses are a developed strategy for "importing tallent" from competitors or neighbors. It has interesting things to say about inerconnection between organisms in a species and between species. Infectability may be a long term strategy for development.
Then again, it could be exactly the other way. Advanced organisms are just diverse platforms which viruses have evolved as elaborate tools and development shops for their survival and propagation.
Moderation : -1 Conservative Viewpoint
Horizontal transfer isn't really over, either - we still have retroviruses.
i hope they all die out forever
As to the vector for horizontal transmission of genetic material how about viruses?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
There have been some other interesting discoveries regarding horizontal gene transfer recently. For example, this PNAS paper looks at sea slugs that can photosynthesize by themselves -- http://www.pnas.org/content/105/46/17867.full.pdf). The sea slugs photosynthesize through a combination of harvesting chloroplasts from the algae they eat and via horizontal transfer of genes involved in photosynthesis from these same algae. This is a bizarre and amazing discovery which demonstrates how genes can move from plants and be incorporated in an animal genome.
yes, but not really surprising looking at jumping genes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_genes
for me: GM might be more complicated than often thought....and maybe more dangerous.
do we really know what we are doing?
it seems there are more mechanism involved in genetics than: parent passes genes to offspring.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors."
Genetically modified foods are like the "artificial selection" equivalent of nature / natural selection - if the transfer of genes can happen from one set of species to another, then GM crops are kinds of an accelerated / selective version of this. If I were Monsanto or another big GM food company, I'd be looking to twist this into "Genetic material gets transferred to other species in nature, what's wrong with us doing it?"
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
I already beat it. The next phase has a really hard boss.
"You are what you eat."
Cue the toilet humor in 3... 2... 1...
"Powers. I have them."
Has the fact that miscarriage occurs in nature silenced the people objecting to induced abortion?
Has the fact that death occurs in nature silenced the people objecting to murder?
Has the fact that group conflicts over territory occur in nature silenced the people objecting to war?
Has the fact that climate changes occur in nature silenced the people objecting to human actions which contribute to climate change?
In general "X occurs in nature" does not silence people who object to humans choosing actions which use or result in X or something very much like it.
One of the big difficulties I have in understanding evolution is the process of gene syntheses. It seems reasonable that over time certain combinations of genes can win out over others, and certainly in bacteria you see this horizontal gene transfer happen all the time. You even see it in plants now thanks to genetic engineering, and before that you saw it in a more limited way thanks to viruses and cross-pollination and things like that. But all these things have to do with the transfer of genetic information between life-forms.
The question in my mind is where did all the genes come from in the first place. Proteins are complex macro-molecules. It's not like one protein that catalyzes one reaction can simply mutate into a different protein that catalyzes a different reaction. It's more of an all or nothing thing. It doesn't seem like you would ever see transitional "evolutionary" forms of proteins for that reason. Worse still, you can't (as far as we know) start with a working a protein and reverse-transcribe from it into a strand of DNA or RNA that could code for it.
What do you think?
Horizontal gene passing is what make several organisms have strains that go from harmless to pathogenic.
Some useful info for the curious masses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
Just why is it that ultra-conservative rants about God or racial superiority or anti-socialism are instantly modded off-topic, troll, and/or flamebait until they sink beneath the thresh hold and yet completely off-topic attacks on Creationism in every story even vaguely connected with biology or evolution get modded +5 insightful?
Same reason why at least someone will look favorably on the fact that you may have served pizza for desert, while you will be forever banished from the kitchen (and other places) if you serve up a pile of dung.
Both are off-topic, but while one still satisfies the basic requirements - the other is a pile of shit.
In the case of pizza - it is still food; in case of pointing out the errors of creationism - it is still a discussion about evolutionary theories, it only digresses towards pointing out the wrong ones.
Creationism and a plate full of dung - a pile of shit.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
especially my co-workers
Have Woese and Goldenfeld a brilliant new idea? All they're saying, I think, is that "parent" and "child" are the appropriate units of selection only when genes are passed vertically: from parent to child. They're suggesting that horizontal gene transfer is underrated as a historical evolutionary force.
Agree or not, it hardly undermines Darwin. Genes weren't known in the 19th century. Darwin didn't have a clue about genes, so we're gonna knock him for being "wrong" about it? I mean, was Jesus wrong about genes, too? It's anachronistic silliness.
Science is fundamentally dynamic. Any science that hasn't progressed in 150 years ain't doing too well. (Dear creationists: stop calling us "Darwinists." We've moved on.) I mean, The Origin came out in 1859, for crying out loud! Darwin was more brilliant, more insightful, and rightly more famous than I'll ever be. But if we both had to take a biology test right now, I'd kill him.
...early life was open-source?! :D
it's how peter parker got his powers!
Spider-man and Batman are the proof of horizontal gene transfer theory.
between Creationism and Global Warming!!! OMGZ
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
Outstanding concept - and correct, of course!
Of course, it is great research, but also quite obvious to the rest of us as viral transfer of DNA material has been known for quite some time, and numerous research grants were submitted in the late '70s and early '80s --- unfortunately that was the time of the anti-science of Reagan and the first wave of neocons.
It was refreshing to read the article and comments without the usual trash-talking between creationists and non-creationists. Maybe the moderators are doing a good job and the trash-talking is just below my threshold, but it's really nice. If civility has broken out on Slashdot, thanks everyone!
an example of Darwinian Evolution, but just at a different level?
For example, if you think of the unit of evolution as a gene instead of an organism and a bacteria as a habitat instead of an organism, then the gene evolves vertically, by replication and duplication. The transfer between two bacteria are just the gene migrating from one habitat to another.
A key point of the article that seems to have slipped past a fair number here is that the researchers are attempting to explain the robustness of the gene replication:
"Evidence for this lies in the genetic code, say Woese and Goldenfeld. Though it was discovered in the 1960s, no one had been able to explain how evolution could have made it so exquisitely tuned to resisting errors. Mutations happen in DNA coding all the time, and yet the proteins it produces often remain unaffected by these glitches. Darwinian evolution simply cannot explain how such a code could arise. But horizontal gene transfer can, say Woese and Goldenfeld."
And:
"In 1991, geneticists David Haig and Lawrence Hurst at the University of Oxford went further, showing that the code's level of error tolerance is truly remarkable. They studied the error tolerance of an enormous number of hypothetical genetic codes, all built from the same base pairs but with codons associated randomly with amino acids. They found that the actual code is around one in a million in terms of how good it is at error mitigation. "The actual genetic code," says Goldenfeld, "stands out like a sore thumb as being the best possible." That would seem to demand some evolutionary explanation. Yet, until now, no one has found one. The reason, say Woese and Goldenfeld, is that everyone has been thinking in terms of the wrong kind of evolution."
The point is that vertical evolution cant' get all the branches to the same point in the stability of gene coding. Their argument is that the fundamental mechanism that allows the system to move forward needed to evolve via vertical transfer and not horizontal.
It's true that its been known for a while, but the significance of horizontal transfer has not.
I'm sure when the creationists hear "Parallel Evolution" they think "God did it"
You'll grow out of it.
That I have been saying that here for the last 8 years. And this was talked at in the CDC lab that I worked at back in 1981. IOW, this is not a new theory. All you have to do is pay attention to how things are jumping. It has everything to do with bio density of population and how fast virus mutates. It also has to do with the blood transfusions in which we transfer these virus.
My guess is that a number of asymptomatic virus exists that are slowly able to move from species to species. Those will increase our evolution. Oddly, it means that it will allow us to pick up diseases that take decades to show. My guess is that when we have a colony on Mars, we will get to see evolution difference show up.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Natural selection describes a process by which beneficial mutations are kept and improve the suitability of a species to its environs. It does not talk about genetics at all. Why wouldn't mutations caused by horizontal gene transfer also apply to natural selection?
You're right - religion and science are the same in one sense. They are guesses at what reality is.
The largest difference is that science acknowledges that it is a guess. A very educated guess, which yes yielded modern life as we know it. Religion tries to claim that it is the truth, and the only truth, and expects it's adherents to doggedly follow it's rules and values way beyond their useful context. To give you an example, a slashdot poster recently gave a ridiculously long opinion on whether pig meat cultivated in a lab would be kosher or not.
Now, religion in it's early days claimed to heal the sick, to make the blind see, and to allow the lame to walk again. It has never done any of these things. Science, on the other hand, has done all of these things and much more. I'll stick with the continued results of the scientific method. You can keep your bronze age mysticism.
GO back to the comic book store and do your research properly, or I'll make you hammer your hamster.
Does this remind anyone else of Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio/Darwin's Children duology? 'Cause it sure reminds me of them!
Check out my novel.
it was certainly horizontal gymnastics that led to my kid's genetic code being built.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Comment removed based on user account deletion
His genetic heritage "selected" him for survival. As millions of scientists simultaneously exposed themselves to vast arrays of chemicals in lab environments (with either no regard for common knowledge safety recommendations or that basic distrust of other scientists exhibiting the occasional evil laugh) and produced offspring; it was a matter of when, not if, Alex would be born. Naturally selected to survive both explosion and immersion in a primordial stew of chemicals, he then received the genetic code of the swamp "horizontally", as it were, thus simultaneously being the fittest and taking the fittest. I think Swamp Thing has a lesson for us all.
If it looks like a duck, let's call it a moose.
I would believe that it could be considered a phase now, because due to human interaction, we've slowed its effectiveness. german engineered cars, selective breeding of animals and plants, Engineering crops to survive in locales that don't support that type of life, Geoengineering to farm in the desert (which I find funny when people complain about a drought IN THE DESERT)
Humans have taken the darwinism theory and shot it to hell.
Yes, at one time, it was a trend, now it has passed.
Im a troll because I disagree with you.
It's not that this 'undermines' Darwin, or that Darwin was 'wrong' about genes, but Evolutionary theory is a hybred. It combines Darwin's insight that natural pressures can select a subset of each generation to differentially reproduce, and Mendel's genetics. When Darwin proposed Natural Selection, he made predictions, such as that whatever mechanisms Heredity used, those mechanisms could not allow for unlimited blending of traits. Mendel's experiments showed how there could be non-blendable control mechanisms at the heart of the reproductive process. It's not just that mutation is a requirement along side natural selection to have the whole theory of Evolution, but that one of Darwin's conditions is the code being occasionally mutated must be a code that doesn't allow more than, at most, very limited blending. So, a non-Mendelian form of genetic transfer doesn't necessarily support Darwin's idea of how selection can work to produce long term changes, and if it doesn't, you can't (or shouldn't) call what's happening in such cases 'evolution'.
Who is John Cabal?
Did anyone else read the summary and suddenly think some scientist has gone an actually elevated the status of the Asari in Mass Effect from a horndog trope to sledgehammer blue alien lesbians into hard sci-fi...into the realm of 'egads!-it-could-happen?-ism'....???
Its better to consider all life on Earth as part of a single organism. Makes one wonder what happens with the decimation of biodiversity.
I have a theory that "genetic momentum", for lack of a better term, exists. Its where you have genes that dictate what your children will have, sort of like code that writes its own code. This kind of phenomena would allow for, for example, giraffes to evolve fairly quickly because there would be a gene that gives their children a longer neck than themselves. This could be the function of what is known as "junk" DNA. Of course, I would like to know if anyone else has heard of something like this, and if it has been proven to exist or not.
From the article:
Interesting.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Someone above ranted about the overuse of the word "paradigm-shift" and I couldn't agree more. However, in this case, I think the use is warranted. Woese himself caused a paradigm-shift when he discovered that the 16S and 18S ribosomal gene is highly conserved in all known organism, meaning that organisms that have similar 16S or 18S sequences are more closely related to each other and vice versa. The previous paradigm, and if you were old enough to remember learning in school was based largely on the morphological and to a certain extent, biochemical properties of the organisms. The current model used in life-sciences are tree-like where "more evolved" species branch off from "less evolved" species and if you trace back this tree, you get to the root of life, where the hypothetical Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)is. This new paradigm proposed by Woese drastically change this neat picture into a cloud-like diagram, with organisms having multiple links with other organisms. No longer can you say organism x2 has a direct lineage to organism x1 since horizontal gene transfers have clouded the relationships with a big impact on the study of evolution. This also has a big impact on computational biology and I am sure, this is more in line with the speciality of the Slashdot crowd. More complex algorithms and computational power have to be utilised to visualize this 3D relationship. As an aside, to those who are virulently defending Darwin, please stop and reconsider what you are doing. I'm not saying that you shouldn't but amidst calls to boycott the New Scientist by Dawkins himself, don't fall into the same behaviour that you tarred the intelligent design crowd.
In my classes genetics I learned this some 30 years ago, so why an article now?
How the individuals changes ( horizontal or vertical gene modification, OGM) is separate from the selection effects that drives evolution.
In his lab, a scientist may come up with lot of gene modification but only the one he will be able to sell (one selection effect, Darwin may not have though about)) will go into the fields where they can breed with the wild flora.
So I get genital herpes and it writes itself into my DNA. Is this horizontal gene transfer because I did not get that genetic code from a parent? More importantly, how can these be genital herpes if they're on my face?
or else!
Monkey see monkey do? I'd imagine someone has already written this.
Individuals learn from surrounding individuals. If you observe a baby you can understand this, as I'm sure pre-language humans did.
I don't recall much about "horizontal" evolution in "On the Oriigin of Species ...". He did recognize a lot of natural hybridization in the plant world. Darwin did pretty well with what was known 150 years ago.. DNA structure has only been known for 50-60 years? . He also seemed to focus heavily on facing entrenched dogma of his day and still faces today.
Enzymes do more than one job and sometimes can quickly take on new rolls. Prions certainly give credence to that. I don't see where it conflicts with Darwin, other than it blurs the distinction between what is living and what is not.. We also see evidence of enzyme with a common heritage. This is pretty much anticipated by Darwin without locking down the the mechanics of genetics.
We are still learning about how DNA works. Sometimes inheritance is not just which chromosome you get. It can depend on methylization of that chromosome. Which can lead to a sort inheritance of acquired traits. Not exactly keeping with Darwin's notions. Also DNA encodes vital information in a sophisticated choreography of coils, kinks, loops and packing of a meter of DNA in cubic micron that is some how passed from generation to generation. We see gene interaction that we would not expect from genes that are so distant on a chromosome.
We still have much to learn about DNA. Darwin's notion of variation in a population does mesh well with DNA replication that makes inexact copies and even Lendl's experiments. The inexact copying that occurs maybe enhanced and suppressed in countless ways. There are single nucleotide substitutions, transposons, deletions, swaps, telomeres, splits and joins. And then we can have extra copies of a chromosomes or even extra sets of chromosomes. Today we have debates about the notion of a molecular clock.
Darwin was rather tied tied the notion of species. It works in many situations and is a great reference point when life takes a different turn. Life has a way of doing just about anything. In the microbial world species is a loaded term. "Horizontal" evolution may not strictly alter the topology of the Darwin's tree of life. It leads to quite a tangle in the roots and a chance to reexamine it.. The transition to the bonzai banyan model vs from the oak model is a powerful paradigm shift. It is important in the microbial world. With our own bodies cells outnumbered 10:1 by microbes and reproduction rates that outpace ours by several orders of magnitude we will see and do see the power of horizontal evolution. We are in a struggle with life on Earth. Humanity really has two checks on its population we have each other and we have microbes. The microbes are doing most of the work. They would have succeeded long ago or stopped it from ever happening if it weren't for the passification, collaboration and domestication of some useful allies in the microbe world by us and our ancestors. As we strain the capacity of Earth they we will provide them with new opportunities for dealing with humanity.
A mother carries parts of the genome of her offspring in her blood. If the genes get into effect the father of this child injected part of his genome into the mother and changed her biological identity.
What about rape? What's the impact on personal integrity?
cb
I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions presented here. Susan Blackmore and Richard Dawkins have described evolution differently -
http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html . The idea relates to replicators, and that the replicators actually evolve, and that genetic replicators are only one form of replication. Wherever there is replication, there is evolution. This relates to genes, and the category described by Dawkins, memes. Susan Blackmore identified a new replicator named temes. (described in the linked video). In this paradigm, evolution relates to replicators adapting to new environments to survive, which could easily apply to organisms that do not partake in genetic evolution.
Participatory Governance : The only feasible option for a real democracy, where everyone really does have a say.
Horizontal gene transfer has been known for a long time, as has its influence on bacterial evolution. So, there is really little fundamentally new insight in this paper.
3. Mutation.
And 2 needs to be further qualified so the the probability of reproduction hinges on some critia.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Away from paradigms and towards an evolutionary theory of the development of science.
Btw, Horizontal gene transfer is only different from 'standard' evolution if you think all evolution occurs at the organism level instead of at the gene level.
I could recommend an excellent book on that subject.
One of the most interesting things I've read in a while.
Like Carl Sagan said, science is self-correcting. He also said you have to back up big statements with big evidence. So best of luck to this theory, in that respect.
Darwin didn;t even know DNA existed. So genes were unknown. But still he came up with his theory of evolution. This *ought* to show people that *how* DNA manages to make mutations wasn't part of the theory.
But it seems like they think that DNA making mutations differently shakes the theory.
It seems to me that one of the reasons journalism science is so bad, is that they believe (rightly or wrongly) that any article which appears to be saying "DARWIN WAS WRONG!" will sell more copies.
The article doesn't say that, obviously, but it at a cursory glance it could be perceived as that.
And the frothing proGM fanatic keeps proposing the myth that GM foods are there to help the world feed itself.
They say there's nothing that could go wrong with adding genes inside other genes and bypassing 1000000 generations of transfer and testing against the world environment.
And they make up what the antiGM famatic says (seriously: I've NEVER heard anyone explain that frankenfoods must arise because you can stick random genes in an organism and it will survive. NEVER).
If you want to explain adaption and the rich variety in nature then a more selective process like vertical gene transfer are probably more relevant.
I think its a question of relevance rather than ignorance from the evolutionary biologists part.
I mean, was Jesus wrong about genes, too?
Well, I don't know quite how to put it, but yes.
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
So, you mean that Uncle Jed, the Pig Fu&*er is on the cutting edge of genetic evolution, and ensuring plenty of 'horizontal gene transfer'?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34824610/ns/technology_and_science-science/?GT1=43001
The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they've eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out photosynthesis — the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy.
...to see if this news bodes well for them, and then reading these comments, to see if someone here can spin it to fit.
Proposed gene therapy technologies (directly inserting new/effective copies of genes into human genomes for therapeutic reasons) would amount to a - albeit engineered - form of lateral gene transfer.
We (humans) would then be subject to a complex and currently unpredictable hybrid of horizontal and vertical evolution.
Darwin never specified how inheritable traits arise. He knew nothing of genes, other than that his theory required the units of inheritance to be discrete. So whether or not genes are transferred horizontally has nothing to do with whether it is Darwinian evolution. The key issue is whether organisms that acquired the trait tended to propagate more successfully and pass the trait onto their descendants, thereby increasing the frequency of that trait in the population. If that is the case, then it is Darwinian evolution.
It's certainly true that many modern scientists have tended to assume that the major source of genetic generation of diversity was spontaneous mutations in an organisms DNA, but the idea of a contribution from gene transfer is not itself particularly novel.
Time to dump OOP inheritance hierarchies and all those cute little animal training examples and replace it with set theory. No wonder my classes grew so messy over time. In the real world, features are promiscuous.
the word of darwin is set in stone and is a sacrosanct theroy. any work that seeks to alter the theroy of evolution is a violation of holy science.
troll out
lose != loose
Maybe it's a matter of semantics, but a better model may be to consider evolution of genes instead of evolution of individuals. In other words, survival of the fittest gene. Even in human populations, we tend to protect relatives because they share many of the same genes as we do as an individual. A pure individual focus wouldn't bother with this.
Instead, it's genes fighting for supremacy less so than individuals. It's still Darwinian evolution, just not individualian (sic?) evolution. Darwin got the process right, just not quite the scope or boundary. The unit of survival is a smaller scale than individual.
By the way, I've read an article that shows evidence that the design of the mammalian placenta is possibly a result of non-mammalian genes being introduced by viruses. Viruses often try to disable the host immune system in order to spread themselves better. But the mammalian placenta needs a similar mechanism to avoid having mother's immune system attack a fetuses' cells but still transfer nutrients, being that the baby's cells are "foreign" from the mother's immune system's perspective.
Rather than reinvent a mechanism from scratch to induce mother-child immunity suppression, mammals inadvertently borrowed a virus's mechanism and that mechanism is with us today. They recognize it as being from a virus because it's surrounded by virus-like genetic idioms (most of which are not used via biological analogs of Go To jump-overs). Thus, our ancestors stole "ideas" from viruses. We are all part virus. Boogady Boogady!
Are your base pairs are belong to me!
Table-ized A.I.
Not a snail, a sea slug: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34824610/ns/technology_and_science-science/?GT1=43001 And yeah, this was the second thing I thought of when "horizontal gene" was brought up (mitochondria being the first).
I've heard all of the "evidence" for the existence of this or that magical sky faerie, and all of it is less credible than the evidence of people who claim to have been kidnapped by aliens and subjected to anal probes. Rejecting an idea that has zero evidence does not make one crazy.
On the other hand, believing in the Talking Snake Theory of Creation despite zero evidence for the Talking Snake Theory and despite massive amounts of evidence for evolution, big bang, etc., is very much insane.
Carl Woese, one of whose earlier discoveries was the third branch of life on Earth, the Archaea.
Uum, H.P. Lovecraft already mentioned Archaea in his “Mountains of Madness” story. So unless Carl Woese is doing science since 1931, I have to doubt this statement...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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