Where are the peer reviewed papers that offer EVIDENCE that it is not?
From your list:
As the result of studies of bacterial variation, it is now widely believed that mutations arise continuously and without any consideration for their utility. In this paper, we briefly review the source of this idea and then describe some
experiments suggesting that cells may have mechanisms for choosing which mutations will occur The origin of mutants
This is Cairns' 1988 paper hawking 'directed mutations.'
Here is a
2004 paper by one of his collaborators:
"Fairly early on in our studies,
Cairns and I eliminated the hypothesis that mutations were “directed” toward a useful goal. The first negative evidence was obtained not with FC40, but with SM195. SM195 has an amber mutation in
lacZ and so reverts both by intragenic mutations and by the creation of tRNA suppressors (11). The continued appearance of extragenic suppressors during lactose selection allowed us to dismiss the hypothesis that the selective conditions “instructed” the cell to make appropriate mutations—in the case of extragenic suppressors, there is no direct path from the phenotype (Lac+) to the mutated gene (encoding a tRNA) (23). Later it was shown that about two-thirds of the late-appearing Lac+ revertants of SM195 were due to slow-growing ochre suppressors that probably arose during growth prior to lactose selection (57). Nonetheless, the continued appearance of fast-growing amber suppressors in addition to the true revertants demonstrated that mutations appear elsewhere than in the gene directly under selection (24)."
But you go on citing that 1988 paper...
