From The Evolution Revolution by Lee Spetner:
Much has been learned in the life sciences in the last several decades about how an organism can alter its genome to enable it to adapt to new environmental conditions. Transposable genetic elements were discovered some seventy years ago by Barbara McClintock (McClintock 1941, 1950, 1955, 1956, 1983), but they were initially dismissed by mainstream geneticists as spurious phenomena. McClintock pursued her research despite it being considered a backwater area, and eventually the importance of her work was recognized by the Nobel Prize committee in awarding her the Prize in Medicine in 1983.
The transposable genetic elements she discovered have been subsequently revealed to be members of a class of genetic rearrangements that do not occur spontaneously by chance but are under strict cellular control. In these rearrangements, sections of DNA can move from one place to another in the genome, or can be removed entirely. These controlled genetic changes can reveal latent genes that were in the genome but were previously unavailable to the organism. Hall (1999) has called them cryptic genes, but more about these genes later.
Environmental changes are known to elicit various kinds of stress in an organism. Furthermore, McClintock noticed in her early work in plants that some types of stress can trigger genetic rearrangements (McClintock 1984). Organisms seem to have the ability to relieve the stress by altering both their phenotype and genotype. Stress has been defined generally as an environmental condition threatening to upset the balance and stability of the organism. Stress in an organism includes many kinds of stimuli. In microorganisms, stress can be an excess or deprivation of necessary molecules, such as sugars or salts. It could also be excessively high or low temperature.
In plants and animals, stress is usually a more complex form of environmental insult. Stress can elicitgenetic rearrangements, which can in turn activate latent (or cryptic) genes. Many examples are known of genetic rearrangements activating latent genes (e.g., Shapiro 1992 & 2009, Hall 1999). Slack et al. (2006) have reported that stress can elicit an adaptive response in E. coli by selectively amplifying genes. Hersh et al. (2004) have reported that stress can induce adaptive genetic changes in E. coli. In subsequent sections I will discuss stress in both single-celled and higher organisms, and its heritable effects. (P. 47)
Lee Spetner? One of the people you should know about if you don’t.
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Read both books; the first one is “Not by Chance” (1997). in my opinion a better book.
Of note on Barbara McClintock
Please note that James Shapiro now rejects neo-Darwinism as being a correct paradigm and now champions a view of evolution that he terms ‘natural genetic engineering’. He is also a founding member of a group of leading researchers called “The Third Way”:
Of humorous note: Now 70 years after jumping genes were first discovered by McClintock, and 30 years after Barbara McClintock discovered that they were related to helping an organism cope with stress, neo-Darwinists now, after decades of labeling them as ‘junk’, have finally decided that they are not junk, but are now claiming that ‘jumping genes’ are just what evolution would have produced
With a can’t lose strategy like that, pretty soon PZ Myers or Richard Dawkins will be saying that they were the founding members of “The Third Way’ and kick Shapiro and the rest to the curb! 🙂
That new book by Dr Spetner is on my “to read” list, thanks for the heads up News:)
I believe the Physics guys/gals will help usher in the New Evo ideas. Of course, Physics guys/gals like Krauss/Carroll will fight back tooth and nail for Religious reasons sigh.
BA77, check out this new paper. Fine tuning in Biology starting to be uncovered? https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-origin-of-life-and-the-hidden-role-of-quantum-criticality-ca4707924552
“We should emphasize again, that finding a large tight binding Hamiltonian tuned exactly or
almost exactly to the critical point by random chance can happen only with an astronomically low probability. So, finding just a single protein with more than 100 amino acids having this property at random is impossible.”
The idea of stress is interesting. I am sure thresholds being crossed does bring instant genetic results change. this is how human colours came instantly to change after the migrations from babel.
It was not a slow thing.
So stress could be the triggering of some memory in the genes to protect the body.
Stress just a special case of a threshol;d being crossed.
Thanks Robert for your post of inestimable value to the understanding of the evolution of skin colour.
Robert Byers, a UD regular.
ppolish, thanks for the link. It is good they found Quantum criticality in a wide range of important biomolecules:
As to:
as to their question at the end of their paper:
I would offer that criticality allows, among many other marvelous and wondrous things that have been barely discovered yet, biophotonic communication between molecules:
Of note: AWG 44 wire is the wire size that is equivalent to the width of a human hair,,
And AWG 44 wire is rated at well below the .014 Ampacity, which is the the last Ampacity they have listed for AWG 40 wire,,,
Thus, since 1 divided by .010 is 100, the ampacity (current carrying capacity) for the protein they measured is at least 100 times better than a copper or silver wire would be compared at the size of a human hair.
Also of note: The best manmade (intelligently designed) conductor of electricity beats copper and silver by only 30 to 50 times:
It is also of interest to note that man is just now taking his first baby steps in using photons in integrated circuits:
It is also of interest to note that photonic communication has much greater fidelity, and quality, of communication than molecular communication does: