Comment by ch4s3
5 hours ago
I don’t really see that as anti-Darwinian. Those genes successfully attach themselves to a new organism and provide advantages such that they are selected for in the population.
5 hours ago
I don’t really see that as anti-Darwinian. Those genes successfully attach themselves to a new organism and provide advantages such that they are selected for in the population.
The selection is classical, but the mutations are supposed to be random, not skewed towards more useful genetic variants. One can speculate that a purely random (and otherwise neutral, say) prior mutation led to this directionality, but the actual resulting mechanism is AFAIK still unknown.
plasmids
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasmid