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Do genes that jump shake the tree of life?

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File:DNA simple.svg

They certainly do. Trampoline of life?

In Japan, some people’s gut bacteria have stolen seaweed-digesting genes from ocean bacteria lingering on raw seaweed salads Ferris Jabr, “The gene that jumped” at Aeon

Well, that’s way easier than inventing it by the Darwinian method:

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, wherever and whenever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

Didn’t Darwinists used to persecute the idea that we could just change or borrow genes?:

However, as has become clear in the past decade, horizontal gene transfer did not halt among eukaryotes and their microbial denizens. A mischievous breeze continued to blow DNA this way and that, from one branch on the tree of life to another. Wolbachia, pea aphids and hornworts all encourage us to accept a truth that seems unsettling at first, but ultimately invites us into greater communion with all life on the planet.

Ferris Jabr, “The gene that jumped” at Aeon

Fine, Ferris. But this is not in the Darwin-in-the-schools’ lobby’s textbooks. Their little old ladies in dracula heels are not picketing in favor of this stuff. Their lawyers are not bringing big court cases, avidly covered by media, bailed out by billionaires, about this stuff.

Yes, it’s real. But it is not Darwin.

What hope is there that textbooks could start teaching reality when even the right to question the Darwinian [sheet] is still a big controversy in many places? Could science writers like Jabr and others agree that it is time to make textbooks about evolution sound like the reality and not like the 1925 Monkey Trial revisited?

See also: Horizontal gene transfer: Sorry, Darwin, it’s not your evolution any more

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Comments
Fine, Ferris. But this is not in the Darwin-in-the-schools’ lobby’s textbooks.
Have you ever read a high school biology textbook or syllabus? HGT is in all the biology textbooks I've been able to checkMimus
September 8, 2019
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Brother Brian, equivocating loser, strikes again! Please tell us how you determined jumping genes arose via blind and mindless processes.ET
September 7, 2019
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If these “jumping genes” are subsequently heritable in their new host then all we are talking about is an additional source of heritable variation for selection to act on. A purely Darwinian process.Brother Brian
September 7, 2019
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