Nick Lane

And you can maintain the quality of genes in a much larger genome.

So bacteria never had the need to do that.

I mean, it sounds quite similar, I guess.

systematic organization of like, here's where the relevant functionality is, and here's like... Well, there is a bit, which is to say, with lateral gene transfer, you would normally match the ends to something you've got already.

So 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.

Yeah.

So you'd only put that in.

And 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 at the same time, you don't know what you put in.

It's really just a scaling thing.

If you pick up a random piece of DNA, you've got a genome which is 10 times larger.

Then, you know, how fast can you pick up DNA from the environment?

You know, you'd have to pick up 10 times as much to do that.

Do you have the capacity to pick up 10 times as much?

And there's also a penalty for doing it, which is to say...

Like a mutation, you've got no idea what you're plugging in.

It could be almost anything.

You know where you're plugging it.

You're plugging it in the right place.