A well-known functionally driven form of genome change is the response to starvation in bacteria. Starvation can increase targeted reorganizations of the genome by a factor of over 100,000. This is one of the mechanisms by which bacteria can evolve very rapidly and in a functional way in response to environmental stress.

Some forms of DNA transfer in microorganisms are also functional since they are activated in response to a stressful environment. This is precisely when organisms need to find new solutions to problems they have encountered.

Denis Noble, Dance To Tune Of Life

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour

A robin red breast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage
A dog starved at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state

The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won’t believe
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever’s fright

William Blake, Auguries Of Innocence

Information that passes from the organism to the genome is of a different kind to that of DNA coding, in which each amino acid in a protein corresponds to (is “encoded by”) some triplet in the DNA sequence.

Information that passes from the organism to the genome is not a property of individual molecular sequences, but rather a property of an ensemble. Information that regulates gene expression does not come from individual proteins, although the final message is conveyed by proteins called transcription factors.

It is the pattern of such factors that passes information from the organism to the genome, and that is a global property of the cells, tissues, and organs involved.

Denis Noble, Dance To Tune Of Life