Scientists Learn How Genes Can Jump Between Species
wsj.com
wsj.com
The basic gist is that some parasitic wasps also transfer a virus to their caterpillar hosts. That virus has now been shown to insert and transfer some wasps genes to some non-host caterpillars.
The introduction mentions wolbachia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbachia - which is an awesome bacterial parasite; it has also transferred genes to hosts. Researchers thought the bacteriophage in Wolbachia helped take part in horizontal gene transfer (HGT), which this study backs up nicely.
Semi-relevant: Richard Dawkins touches upon the relationship between the genes of parasites and hosts in the Chap. 13, "The Long Reach of the Gene" (added in 2. ed.) of his book "The Selfish Gene".
He says that if the parasite genes are "transmitted to future generations via the same vehicles as the host's genes [...], the parasite will do all that it can to help the host, not only to survive, but to reproduce. Over evolutionary time it will cease to be a parasite, will cooperate with the host, and may eventually merge into the host's tissues and become unrecognizable as a parasite at all." [0]
P.S. Apropos of Wolbachia, did you also play MGS V recently?;P
[0]: https://books.google.no/books?id=koaD_Aod_V0C&lpg=PT343&ots=...
Within 20 years gaian thinking probably won't seem so silly - we are part of a macro organism.
edit: replaced with Wikipedia page which has more detail.
Which is also my counter-criticism of the idea that this idea destroys the objection to GMO... the natural mechanisms still co-evolved with us ("us" being the whole biosphere here). It is mathematically reasonable to be concerned that fully artificial genetic manipulation is of a different kind, and not merely of a different quantity. (Even ignoring that in the latter case, sufficient quantity takes on a quality of its own.)
Generally I've been pretty positive on GMO food but I have to admit that the mathematical argument against it has a certain potency, when you understand the mathematics of evolution. There is a significant qualitative difference between coevolved mechanisms and artificial mechanisms that ignore that history. I'm still not convinced that our current skills are really great enough to produce some sort of disaster, but that's a debate point with an expiration date on it.
> Opponents have frequently maintained that an interspecies gene transfer done in a laboratory—the insertion of a bacterial gene into corn to make it insect-resistant, for example—would never occur naturally and is therefore unethical and potentially unsafe.
> The new study, published Thursday in the journal PLOS Genetics, undermines that argument.
> "You realize that nature is creating genetically modified organisms all the time,” said Salvador Herrero, a geneticist at the University of Valencia, Spain, and co-author of the study. “It’s not so weird to transfer genes from one organism to another.
I don't see how these results undermine the argument in any way, _whatsoever_, Mr. Naik.
The only way it can undermine an anti-GMO agenda is to "equate" human genetic modifications to nature's genetic modifications. The gene vectors we create are different.
Herrero's point laid out here also appears taken out of the scope of the results of the original study. Or, more accurately, Herrero's point was taken out of context by the authors of the WSJ piece.
Whether the modifications are done by nature or by an agent is irrelevant in itself, as nothing is exclusively inherent to either approach.
Any legitimate skepticism would be backed by critique of theory or argument, and/or contributing alternative explanations.
Even if one proves that something applies to a step/layer, one cannot generalize downwards (towards the general); only upwards (towards the specific).
That's why I find the anti-GMO craze weird: Genetic modification in itself isn't harmful, and also happens in nature all the time (as if this makes a difference). It's specific outcomes of certain modifications, or side-effects of specific applied techniques (as noted in the article you linked to).
So, whether a genetic modification is performed by "chance" (as in by nature), or deliberately (as in by humans) is irrelevant in and of itself.
Weakness or risk is inherent not in the performing agent (or lack thereof), but in the the technique or its application – which is clear from the article.
"Genes typically persist if they provide some benefit."
Or genes persist if they don't provide some detriment. Evolution is a value maximising process, so it minimises costs of reproduction.
It also casually lumps horizontal transfer between bacteria into the same category as multicellular life. We _know_ how bacteria do it, and it's not how most eukaryotic cells are built.
Opponents of GMOs are very vocal about introduction of "foreign" genes into species. ("How can we have a rapid-growth salmon, if they escape into the environment?" is a typical argument.) But that argument looks pretty feeble if you consider the above mentioned research.
We already have plenty of lessons of introducing existing species outside of their natural environment which resulted in disaster for the local ecosystem.
Its an argument for GMO foods (or, more precisely, an illustration of the naivete of a common argument against GMO foods) in that it illustrates that the processes used in GMO foods (but accelerated and more focused) are not as dissimilar to the processes that are responsible for genetic change in the wild (and which are accelerated and more focused in traditional breeding), so that the difference in kind that anti-GMO crusaders try to draw between evil GMOs, on the one hand, and safe products of traditional breeding, on the other -- on the basis of the methods that produce the genetic changes in each -- is an illusory distinction.
Quite a visionary that man.