Question Regarding Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker

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The discussion centers around a passage from Richard Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker, which highlights the concept of gene incorporation across species, particularly through mechanisms like horizontal gene transfer. The original poster expresses curiosity about this phenomenon, specifically regarding how genes from one species can be integrated into another, using examples like plant hemoglobins and bio-luminescent bacteria in anglerfish. They seek additional resources at a popular science level to better understand this topic. Responses include suggestions for further reading, such as research papers on horizontal gene transfer in plants, and mention a hypothesis that challenges Dawkins' assertion about the uniqueness of hemoglobins in the pea family. The conversation emphasizes the complexity of gene transfer and its implications in evolutionary biology.
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Hi everyone,

I'm currently reading Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker and there is one part that had me really fascinated, but wasn't really explored in detail that much.

On page 249 he writes:

Duplication within the species isn't the only means by which the number of cooperating genes has increased in evolution. An even rarer, but still possibly very important occurrence, is the occasional incorporation of a gene from another species, even an extremely remote species. There are, for example, haemoglobins in the roots of plants of the pea family. They don't occur in any other plant families, and it seems almost certain that they somehow got into the pea family by cross infection from animals, viruses perhaps acting as intermediaries.

I know that some organisms (like anglerfish that use bio-luminescent bacteria, for example) can use other organisms in their own biochemistry, but I wasn't aware that a "cross infection", as he puts it, could occur.

Can anyone point me in the direction of some additional resources that explore this topic in detail? Preferably at the "pop science" level as my background is in math and physics, not biology!

Thanks!
 
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I'm not sure what Dawkins had in mind, but searching for "horizontal gene transfer plants" on Google turned up http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/...l+gene+transfer+on+plant+colonization+of+land (paper is free using the PMC link at the top right of the page). The introduction of the paper could provide some leads.

Arredondo-Peter and Escamilla point to a hypothesis by Appleby et al that Dawkins may not be right on this point, and that there may be hemoglobins in other other plants. Some more current work seems to be described in http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19704508 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23600702.
 
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Excellent, thanks for the reply - knowing the name of what he's talking about should help narrow down the results!
 

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