> You did say that, but you meant directionality — otherwise it would be completely unclear what your initial comment wanted to say, because it seems to specifically have objected to my assertion that no directed changes of the germ line exist.

No, I did not mean directionality. I meant what I said, and was very explicit about it. In my first post I quoted the exact bit of your comment I was replying to, which went like this: "So far there’s no known mechanism for systematic, guided DNA changes, and no good reason to assume that such mechanisms exist (on the contrary)." I wasn't even sure if there would be disagreement between us when I originally replied to that, because I'm not sure how broad the definitions you're using for "systematic" and "guided" are. I could see arguing that evolution changing the variability of a subset of the genome is "guided" in some sense, as it can "guide" the process towards more changes in a particular subsystem, but I could also see not arguing that since it lacks direction. Language is mushy. I was trying to qualify your statement, and I posed questions and made statements of my own to that end, but I wasn't sure if my positions were in conflict with yours until you replied. Now I think our positions probably weren't in conflict, but you made assumptions about what I meant to convey based on the larger context of your own post rather than the actual content of mine.