Thank You Alex!! !

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Thanks for starting the forum Alex.

Please bear with us, whilst our creaky old brains churn into action

yes thank you...

umm... dont see you around here much, pity really..

but then you have probebly got a life, unlike me

Thanks old chap ! !!

Nice to have our own bit of space ! !!

... and GIT OFF OF MY LAWN, ya dern kids! <shakes cane>

Don't worry, I emptied the Cafe's litter boxes there last night. (Remember, we do have twenty kitties at the cafe).

P.S. It's not my fault that you won't name them. Someone will.

This thread is a thank-you to you, Alex.
The polite, mature thing to say is, "You're welcome".

BTW, I suspect that Beenthere's comment is a reference to the name of the thread, which certainly threw me when I saw it.

I haven't heard of horizontal gene transfer in anything higher than a bacterium. If it did happen, instead of there being a few million species on the earth, there would be several trillion.
Oh! Unless you include artificial gene manipulation. You know, considering the pay-off, I thought for sure there would be a true blue rose marketed by now, but apparently using the blue created by gentian genes didn't work because of (let's see how good the memory is) the acid environment in rose petals. So the people looking to insert blue genes (blue jeans, ha ha ha, ah, where was I?) in roses were looking for other plants. Hmm. Are there only blue genes in basic environments? Has anybody kept closer track than I have about the matter?

Once I started work on a novel about inserter viruses gone amok. Forget why I abandoned it.

Thanks, Alex

Thank you, thank you, Alex! The people were packed so tightly in here, I couldn't breath!

Thanks Alex. We will make good use of it.

That need not be so. If Bob carries a gene that entered his lineage through horizontal gene transfer, and Julie doesn't have that gene but Bob and Julie can produce viable & fertile offpsring together (which would probably be the case), then Bob & Julie are the same species.



I didn't think of that! Of course that should be included. Surely we are fully integral parts of nature, and of the evolutionary process. The evolutionary relevance of these manipulations can't really be assessed yet, though, because they haven't been happening long enough.

The question I asked was inspired by an interesting article, an interview with biologist Lynn Margulis, which you can find by clicking here.

The piece of that (very long) interview most relevant to this issue is this:

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The neo-Darwinists say that variation originates from random mutation, defining mutation as any genetic change. By randomness they mean that characters appear randomly in offspring with respect to selection: if an animal needs a tail, it doesn't develop this tail because it needs it; rather, the animal randomly develops all sorts of changes and those with tails survive to produce more offspring. H.J. Muller, in the 1920s, discovered that not only do X rays increase the fruit-fly mutation rate, but even if fruit flies are isolated completely from X rays, solar radiation, and other environmental perturbation, a spontaneous mutation rate can be measured. Inherited variants do appear spontaneously; they have nothing to do with whether or not they're good for the organism in which they appear. Mutation was then touted as the source of variation- -that upon which natural selection acted — and the neo-Darwinian theory was declared complete. The science remaining required filling in the gaps in a "theory" with very few holes.

From many experiments, it is known that if mutagens like X rays or certain chemicals are presented to fruit flies, sick and dead flies result. No new species of fly appears — that is the real rub. Everyone agrees that such mutagens produce inherited variation. Everyone agrees that natural selection acts on this variation. The question is, From where comes the useful variation upon which selection acts? This problem has not yet been solved. But I claim that most significant inherited variation comes from mergers — from what the Russians, especially Konstantin S. Mereschkovsky, called symbiogenesis and the American Ivan Emanuel Wallin called symbionticism. Wallin meant by the term the incorporation of microbial genetic systems into progenitors of animal or plant cells. The new genetic system — a merger between microbe and animal cell or microbe and plant cell — is really different from the ancestral cell that lacks the microbe. Analogous to improvements in computer technology, instead of starting from scratch to make all new modules again, the symbiosis idea is an interfacing of preexisting modules. Mergers result in the emergence of new and more complex beings. I doubt new species form just from random mutation.

Symbiosis is a physical association between organisms, the living together of organisms of different species in the same place at the same time. My work in symbiosis comes out of cytoplasmic genetic systems. We were all taught that the genes were in the nucleus and that the nucleus is the central control of the cell. Early in my study of genetics, I became aware that other genetic systems with different inheritance patterns exist. From the beginning, I was curious about these unruly genes that weren't in the nucleus. The most famous of them was a cytoplasmic gene called "killer," which, in the protist Paramecium aurelia, followed certain rules of inheritance. The killer gene, after twenty years of intense work and shifting paradigmatic ideas, turns out to be in a virus inside a symbiotic bacterium. Nearly all extranuclear genes are derived from bacteria or other sorts of microbes. In the search for what genes outside the nucleus really are, I became more and more aware that they're cohabiting entities, live beings. Live small cells reside inside the larger cells. Understanding that led me and others to study modern symbioses.

Symbiosis has nothing to do with cost or benefit. The benefit/cost people have perverted the science with invidious economic analogies. The contention is not over modern symbioses, simply the living together of unlike organisms, but over whether "symbiogenesis" — long-term symbioses that lead to new forms of life — has occurred and is still occurring. The importance of symbiogenesis as a major source of evolutionary change is what is debated. I contend that symbiogenesis is the result of long-term living together — staying together, especially involving microbes- -and that it's the major evolutionary innovator in all lineages of larger nonbacterial organisms.
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Indeed.

Looks like it's going quite well.

got enough sunshine to cook with yet?

Because you read David Brin's "The Giving Plague"?

Isn't that done with aluminum sheets?

AND YES!! ! Thank you, Alex! And get something good and healthy to eat. Your older self will thank you for it!

Love you! (but not in that creepy, older lady way)