Paracrinkle Virus and Inheritance

Abstract

IN a recent article¹, I have argued that viruses and what I call plasmagenes² are derived from cell proteins. On my view, these undifferentiated proteins may come to acquire the properties either of infection or, alternatively, of inheritance, by processes of adaptation which I attempted to describe. I also represented these processes in a diagram (Fig. 3) in which arrows showed the conceivable and, to me, probable directions of evolutionary change.