The main problem of studying biological evolution

Abstract

The evolutionary aspect of the emergence problem is the main problem of studying the laws of biological evolution. A possible mechanism of how an ontogenetically modified phenotype (phenotypic modification, “morphosis”) is fixed in the genotype – the problem of “genetic assimilation” is considered. In particular, it is assumed that adaptive mutagenesis is involved in this, generating random multiple mutations that are “not Lamarckian”, but Darwinian, because they occur in random places in the genome. Stress-induced mutations that arise as a result of error-prone repair processes, while not targeting specific genes, are not randomly scattered around the genome. On the contrary, these mutations are concentrated around double-stranded DNA breaks caused by various stressors. It is assumed that the breaks occur with greater probability in actively transcribed DNA regions, reflecting the current activity of the organism and being the most open DNA regions. All this creates the conditions for the more likely appearance of useful mutations in the “trained” locus of the genome. Keywords: selectogenesis, nomogenesis, genetic assimilation, stress-mutagenesis.