jumping genes (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 14, 2018, 18:51 (2107 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You posted this on an unrelated thread, so I've brought it back under a different title.

DAVID: [...] horizontal transfer seems to be one of the ways evolution has progressed. I've just presented that. The article uses transfer by parasite bites, viruses, etc . to explain it, because it is hard to imagine my horses' genes jumping into me. The article is long but informative and I've entered it before here, but on our site is will not reproduce, so I looked it up again:

https://aeon.co/essays/genes-that-jump-species-does-this-shake-the-tree-of-life

dhw: Thank you for this. I’ve taken the liberty of extracting quotes which seem to me to offer scientific evidence for natural means of innovation, and for the whole process of cellular cooperation as a driving force for evolution.

QUOTES:

It seems that the genome of just about every modern species is something of a mosaic constructed with genes borrowed from many different forms of life.

McClintock’s pioneering work demonstrated for the first time that a genome is highly dynamic, not forever fixed in one order.

Now it seems our own genome is a patchwork of raw genetic material coming from different places with different histories – that to me is very profound. Even the largest eukaryote genomes have this patchwork origin to them.’

In a surprising number of instances, however, wayfaring genes make a new life for themselves, becoming successful enough to change the way an organism behaves and steer its evolution.

In some cases, this genetic hopscotching ‘could exert a very powerful evolutionary force’, says Li. ‘It can introduce novelties that cannot be achieved by gradual genetic mutations.’

Horizontal gene transfer opens the possibility of a creature instantaneously acquiring a gene-trait combo that its own genome would have been unlikely to invent by itself.

Rather than evolving from one ‘last universal ancestor’, all life arose from a communal pool of primitive cells with unbridled zeal for exchanging DNA

All of these quotes build a picture of the majority of information in the genome was pressent from the beginning and just rearranged in the code of DNA.