Horizontal gene transfer in eukaryotic algal evolution

摘要

Although seemingly innocuous, the power of something as simple as a drop of water, given a few millions of years over which to act continually, is immediately and awe-inspiringly obvious to someone peering over the edge of the Grand Canyon. Acting over a similarly immense time period but on vastly different scales, this massive effect from a weak, but constant, force embodies how natural selection has been able to direct the evolution of once primitive, mal-adapted biological structures to the remarkable and almost inconceivably diverse molecular machines found within extant organisms. This idea of natural selection as a slow-and-steady workhorse was central to Charles Darwin's evolutionary synthesis, as epitomized in his oft-repeated precis "Natura non facit saltum," Nature does not make leaps. Darwin would not live to see the discovery of genes as the vessel of inheritance and random mutation as the propagator of change, although these breakthroughs would serve to reinforce his prescient ideas.