It's a long shot, but perhaps targets of the Recording Industry Association of America's crackdown on file sharing could plead a biological influence: they learned it from bacteria and viruses.
For residents of that invisible world, free information-swapping is a way of life: it's called horizontal gene transfer. And when I talked yesterday with Eugene Koonin, a researcher who helped discover a virus that takes genes from another virus, he started out by calling the process "stealing" -- and then corrected himself.
"This is more like making a copy, and making it your own," he said. "It's more similar to pirating CDs than simply stealing.
Of course, his particular virus uses its target's genetic machinery to copy those genes, in the process making it sick -- the equivalent of copying a file with someone else's computer, and causing it to run slowly. That's not the most sympathetic image.
But in most of the viral and bacterial world, copying genes and having your own copied is a way of life, one that proceeds smoothly without hindering either party. It's a fundamental property of microbe-
and virus-hood.
"Anything might happen. The virus doesn't know. It simply does it because it can," said Koonin. "The ability to do so is simply a byproduct of the ability to replicate DNA."
In any given instance, it's no more beneficial than, say, that first
Patrick Wolf album, which I deleted as fast as I could listen to it.
(Just kidding, RIAA!) But in a big-picture view, it makes it possible for bacteria and viruses to flourish; it may very well have kick-started the evolution of higher life forms. And from Patrick Wolf one might (hypothetically!) trace an evolutionary path to my plunking down cold, hard cash for Four Tet's discography.
*Image: **The bdelloid rotifer Adineta vaga. (It's an animal, not a microbe, but what the heck, it's gene-swapper.) Courtesy of Eugene Gladyshev, *Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory
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