Alternative Evolution: Why Change Your Own Genes...

[Tank]

Alternative Evolution: Why Change Your Own Genes When You Can Borrow Someone Else's?

ScienceDaily (July 9, 2010) â€" It has been a basic principle of evolution for more than a century that plants and animals can adapt genetically in ways that help them better survive and reproduce.

Now, in a paper to be published in the journal Science, University of Rochester biologist John Jaenike and colleagues document a clear example of a new mechanism for evolution. In previous well documented cases of evolution, traits that increase an animal's ability to survive and reproduce are conferred by favorable genes, which the animal passes on to its offspring. Jaenike's team has chronicled a striking example of a bacteria infecting an animal, giving the animal a reproductive advantage, and being passed from mother to children. This symbiotic relationship between host animal and bacteria gives the host animal a readymade defense against a hazard in its environment and thus has spread through the population by natural selection, the way a favorable gene would...

[Caecilian]

Lynn Margulis has been arguing for the importance of symbiosis in evolution for years. Her stuff is well worth reading.

[Ellainix]

Changing your genes will carry the optimized genes onto your children.

"Borrowing", with the implied difference, will put your own personal bad genes on life support straight unto the next generation.

At most, I hope this is a temporary solution that eventually leads to a permanent solution.