You might find this interesting:
Is evolution a conscious choice and not a random effect?
Evolution (life-sustaining mutations) derives as a direct response to a traumatic environmental crisis.
From Bruce Lipton's Spontaneous Evolution, pages 241-244
Because evolution appeared to be driven solely by mutations, science concluded that randomly driven evolution has no purpose. The idea fit well with scientific materialism's belief in a purely materialistic Universe and helped shift the focus from intentional creation to merely a "throw of genetic dice." A human being is just another [of] the "accidental tourists" who materialized in the biosphere through random acts of heredity.
However, in 1988, internationally prominent geneticist John Cairns challenged science's established belief in random evolution. Cairns' novel research on bacteria, facetiously titled, "The origin of mutants," was published in the prestigious British Journal of Nature.
He chose bacteria with a crippled gene that made a defective version of the enzyme lactase needed to digest lactose, a sugar present in milk. He then inoculated these lactase-deficient bacteria into cultures in which the only nutrient was lactose. Unable to metabolize this nutrient, the bacteria could neither grow nor reproduce, so no colonies were expected to appear in any of the experiments. Yet, surprisingly, a large number of cultures expressed growth of bacterial colonies.
Sampling the bacteria he started with Cairns found that mutated forms did not exist in the original inoculum. Consequently, he concluded that lactase gene mutations followed, not preceded, their exposure to the new environment. Unlike the experiments of Luria and Delbruck, which relied on viruses killing the bacteria almost instantly, Cairns's experiment starved bacteria slowly. In other words, Cairns gave the stressed bacteria sufficient time to engage and activate innate mutation-producing mechanisms in order to survive.
In Carns's study, life-sustaining mutations appeared to derive as a direct response to a traumatic environmental crisis. Interestingly, further assays revealed that only the genes associated with lactose metabolism were affected. In addition, out of the five possible different mutation mechanisms, all of the surviving bacteria expressed the exact same type of mutation. Clearly, the results do not support the assumption of totally random mutations.
Cairns referred to this newly discovered mechanism as directed mutation. But the very idea that environmental stimuli could feed back into an organism and direct a rewriting of genetic information was an abomination to the central dogma, and the response from conventional science was swift and hostile....
Other the next decade, other researchers replicated Carns's results, which should have increased the credibility of his work. However, the scientific community still considered his notion to be shocking and unacceptable.
