Excellent excerpt, and some useful concepts. The research is quite insightful:
Genetic cross-talk -- a commerce of genes -- "...Such a transfer previously had been recognized as having a minor role in evolution, but the arrival of microbial genomics, Woese says, is shedding a more accurate light. Horizontal gene transfer, he argues, has the capacity to rework entire genomes."
Horizontal gene transfer - The three primary divisions of life now comprise the familiar bacteria and eukaryotes, along with the Archaea. Woese argues that these three life forms evolved separately but exchanged genes, which he refers to as inventions, along the way. ...<But> "as a cell design becomes more complex and interconnected a critical point is reached where a more integrated cellular organization emerges, and vertically generated novelty can and does assume greater importance." ...Woese calls this critical point in a cell's evolutionary course the Darwinian Threshold, a time when a genealogical trail, or the origin of a species, begins.
"Neither it nor any variation of it can capture the tenor, the dynamic, the essence of the evolutionary process that spawned cellular organization...."
Re: "Time has come for biology to go beyond the Doctrine of Common Descent."
>>> This is not a rejection of evolutionary theory, but rather an elaboration on it, an enrichment of the fundimentals and an expansion of the possibilities. "The Doctrine of Common Descent" has always been too narrow a view of speciation, and has been ripe for a more precise explication.
>>> Before there was speciation, there existed a soup of proto organisim life - in a constant dance of 'co-opetition'... with significant interchange of genetic and other molecular material among the nascent species.
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