And yet that’s what they are saying:
We all must play the game of life with the cards we’re dealt, so the common aphorism goes. In biology, this means organisms must compete through natural selection with the genes and anatomy they were born with. But the saying is a lie. Okay, it’s not exactly a lie, but modern research suggests that the game of life is far more complicated than we had anticipated. There are opportunities to swap cards and even steal other players’ hands. …
Examples of acquired metabolisms abound in nature. Some are familiar, like the microbes in a cow’s gut that enable it to digest cellulose. Others are more common but less well-known. For instance, consider the symbiotic fungi that help plants source minerals from the soil. And then there are truly unusual acquired metabolisms, like sea slugs that steal chloroplasts from their food so they can photosynthesize.
University of California – Santa Barbara, “What happens when traits jump between branches of the tree of life” at ScienceDaily (May 3, 2022)
It’s called horizontal gene transfer.
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