Some Microorganisms Can Bend Rules of Evolution

[cwhenderson (Curtis Henderson)]

Help with literature review on experimental evidence for mechanisms of eukaryotic HGT

To the collected brainpower at PS: One question much discussed here concerns whether the distribution of genes in Earth life is better explained by a nested hierarchy with a single root, or design. (These are not exclusive, of course, but let’s just take Tree of Life versus some ID pattern for the time being.) Design as a hypothesis in biological systematics suffers from being poorly articulated, or not articulated at all. Nonetheless, attempts are being made – e.g., Winston Ewert’s dependency graph proposal, some preliminary thought experiments by Eric Holloway [go to the BioLogos forum, Phylogenetic Signal threads] – to put something up for consideration. Meanwhile, in research for a book I’m writing on common descent, I’ve been looking at the growing literature on eukaryotic horizontal gene transfer (HGT). Here are two recent papers: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nyas.14471 One evidential dimension missing from these papers, but critical to forming …