Apparently Darwin’s work was decent but according to Carl Woese and physicist Nigel Goldenfeld, both at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, evolution had a few tricks up it’s sleeve that Darwin, and most of our current evolutionary biologists have overlooked. Lateral genetics? Check it out:
At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer – in which organisms acquire genetic material “horizontally” from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself. Since micro-organisms represented most of life on Earth for most of the time that life has existed – billions of years, in fact – the most ancient and prevalent form of evolution probably wasn’t Darwinian at all, Woese and Goldenfeld say.
For the whole story please visit New Scientist, one of my favorite scientific news outlets for over a decade:
New Scientist: The evolution of evolution
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My name is Charles Macnish. I’ve made 28 trips around the sun so far, and I currently find myself running all over this place called Earth. I enjoy everything about being alive. Happy or sad, I am ecstatic about the opportunity to experience all of what life has to offer.
I love creating possibilities from abstract concepts that can be brought together to create new realities. With my own music and helping others find a way to create and share their music. I enjoy bringing people together to enjoy the transcendent experience of music which rises above pride, ego, politics, religion, language, and other illusions of duality.
I spend most of my time creating sonic frequencies and putting together abstract ideas concerning eastern philosophy and quantum theory. I’m very much looking forward to a future resembling one laid out in Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near”, in which humans combine with created non-biological intelligence to surpass our current biological limitations of evolution.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. 