AuldSoul:
Miniscule and exponentially manifest organismic response to environmental pressures is only predicted in a system where the organism strives to survive.
What? Can you rephrase that please? I can't quite make sense of it.
"Natural selection", as explained by Dawkins and as initially suggested by Darwin to explain the obvious commonality he saw, requires that the organism cares whether it survives.
No it does not. It requires merely that organisms that are better equipped to survive are more likely to survive. It can be useful to think of an organism (or gene) "caring" about its survival as long as one remembers that it is only true in a metaphorical sense.
It also requires that there be an empirically demonstrable acquisition of new code (or activation of dormant code) that is beneficial to a species in order to be proved.
Luckily there's no shortage of examples.
Margulis' theory utterly solves the problem of "new code".
It's not really a problem that needs solving. And in any case, what Margulis proposed has little bearing on most of evolution. It's quite obvious that the majority of significant mutations in the history of any species have involved point mutations, rather than the assimilation of another organism.
But this is, in my opinion, merely incidental to the true beauty of her theory and its potential to unify our comprehension of several fields of science which have been relatively bad bedfellows to date.
What is the "true beauty of her theory", to what fields of science are you referring and how can her theory help unify them?
BurnTheShips:
I'd really like to see how.
I doubt it but let's give it a go anyway. For two organisms to combine either there was a point mutation in one or both of them that allowed this novel state of affairs, or there was no such change, just a bit of environmental serendipity that brought the two together. In either case, the offspring would be significantly different genetically from its parents. Such a sudden and profound genetic change could be thought of as a macro-mutation.
Alternatively, of course, it's possible to think of each organism as part of the environment of the other, as each continues to pass its genes along separately. Over time mutations in both organisms increase the advantage that the symbiosis initially gave them.
Whichever view you take it quickly becomes obvious that such a situation presents no problem for Darwinism, universal Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, Dawkinsian neo-Darwinism or any other view that is actually held by mainstream biologists.
