Nick Lane: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Finally lateral gene transfer. Here the analogy might be, you’ve got one repository for editing web pages and another repository for controlling airline software. What you just do is you take a random 500-line sequence in this web page editing software and you just put it in a random point in the airplane management software. There’s no systematic organization of, “Here’s where the relevant functionality is.” There is a bit, which is to say with lateral gene transfer, you would normally match the ends to something you’ve got already. I don’t know enough about coding to give a comparable example, but effectively you would be picking up a module which had some resemblance in terms of, “Okay, it fits into this part of the code. ” So you’d only put that in. It may or may not be useful there, but it’s not just completely random. It’s plugged into a place where you know you have something like that that used to be there or could be there. So it’s not just random, but you don’t know what you put in. So then I don’t really have a good intuition for why lateral gene transfer does not produce similar benefits to recombination.…

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