> A lightning can definitely do the trick in some conditions. Many cells will die, but it is a sacrifice natural selection is willing to make.
While I agree with Dennett,* I don’t think agency is correctly ascribed here, unless you can find selection for locations of increased lightning incidence(!).
It’s more like “any survivors remain subject to natural selection, as did those unfortunates that did not survive”
But, to nitpicking, I guess you could say the selection came after the gene got recombined. Surviving the zap and was lucky enough to do the recombination still do nothing. The effect of the recombination, i.e. the expression of the foreign gene, is the interesting part. If it confers an advantageous trait to the mutant, that mutant get selected for in the game of life. If it doesn't, which is most often the case, it is selected against, and would be quickly removed from the genetic pool.
We do this selection quite often in the lab so perhaps it unconsciously leaked out in my phrasing.
Yes, that was the topic of the article. I am just dubious that a location that got a lot of lightning could be selected for, though lightning is not uniform across the globe. But it's a rather crude factor and hard to defend against on a micro scale!
It’s also worth noting that early in earth’s history, it was geologically very active and thus resulted atmosphere with all kinds of extreme weather—including lightning storms.
I don’t know how likely spontaneous recombination is, but those two data points make it seem plausible enough that electricity may have had an important role in the development of life on earth.
In the past there were periods of billions of years at a stretch with not much else going on that single celled organisms being zapped by lightning. You'd think that in those conditions it happened and probably frequently enough to make a difference.
For multi-cellular organisms the picture is completely different and it likely wouldn't matter nearly as much.
Let me phrase it a different way: I don't think there are any organisms selecting for being genetically modified in petri dishes by researchers in research labs. I consider the gene transfers by lightning to be the equivalent of that.
Unsurprisingly there are organisms that seem to preferentially strike (and mutate) in hospitals, but have they (yet?) selected for some special preference for, say, urban hospitals? I doubt it, though it would be cool (and probably frightening) if so. That situation would be more likely to evolve than the researcher case.
There were no organisms selecting to reproduce either. Of course, natural selection is largely a random process that organisms are subject to rather than a process that requires them to be active agents.
I feel there is a useful analogy in what happens in toxic environments. In areas where there are high levels of arsenic, for example, you find a limited ecology of organisms adapted to tolerate it, and I think I am right to say that they do not do well outside of this environment, as the mechanisms of tolerance are sub-optimal where they are not needed.
The most relevant situation would be where the environmental toxin is mutagenic. My uninformed guess is that adaptation to that environment would typically involve mechanisms to reduce susceptibility to the toxin's mutagenic effect, and, as in the case with other toxins, organisms so adapted would be out-competed in areas where the toxin is not present.
I guess we have examples in the microbes which have adapted to live in areas of high radiation, but I do not know how they fare elsewhere.
Update: D. radiodurans is an example, but it has been suggested that its tolerance is simply a side effect of a mechanism for dealing with prolonged cellular desiccation - another sort of environment where they do well.
That's cause and effect reversed! Organisms don't select, it's selection pressure that determines which organisms get to the age of reproduction and whose offspring are viable. Some outside factor (environment, another organism) needs to supply the pressure. Absent pressure life will occupy whatever room you give it until it runs up against some kind of boundary and then that pressure will take over again.
While I agree with Dennett,* I don’t think agency is correctly ascribed here, unless you can find selection for locations of increased lightning incidence(!).
It’s more like “any survivors remain subject to natural selection, as did those unfortunates that did not survive”
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_stance