The examples of gradient hackers with positive effects seem like they could be following the pattern of “here’s a sub-system doing something bad (e.g. transposons copying themselves incessantly), which the system needs to defend against, so the system finds a way (e.g. introns) to defend which carries other (maybe greater) benefits but which wouldn’t have been found otherwise”, does that seem like it explains things?
Yes, this is broadly accurate from my knowledge of positive examples (for the organism) of drive. They either contribute more scratch (TEs) or they drive through a nifty innovation (homing endonucleases for mating type switching in yeast, VJD recombination in immune cells) that can be coopted. It’s possible there are other positive contributions that we don’t know about, of course.
Yes, this is broadly accurate from my knowledge of positive examples (for the organism) of drive. They either contribute more scratch (TEs) or they drive through a nifty innovation (homing endonucleases for mating type switching in yeast, VJD recombination in immune cells) that can be coopted. It’s possible there are other positive contributions that we don’t know about, of course.