Transposons as Environmental Stress Detectors, Are Eukaryotic Genomes Evolved to Evolve?

Stress can be defined as any perceived threat to organismal survival, thus detecting stress is vital to evolutionary fitness. Similarly, the capacity to adapt to changing or threatening environments is also important to the survival of individuals and organisms. Classically, evolutionary adaptation to stress and change has been viewed as a slow and largely random process. However, research from a variety of fields suggests that genomes have the capacity to arrive at adaptive outcomes much more quickly than the Modern Synthesis would predict. Transposable elements contribute to the capacity of genomes to detect stress and create adaptive responses to stress at both the individual and, as argued here, evolutionary, level.