The End of Evolution By Means of Natural Selection

I may be restating some info here, but:
When (these particular?) bacteria get put in an environment that isn't exactly the most conducive to their survival, they go batshit and hit the panic button - the error-prone polymerases that Taq mentioned. That makes more mutations happen in the same time, effectively speeding up the evolutionary process: more mutations can be acted upon by external factors, and it is more likely that one which enables lactose/lactase (is the latter a typo, or both actually used?) metabolism will arise. Those bacteria that are more likely to produce/produce more of the polymerase are more likely to survive in the adverse environment, because they are more likely to find a beneficial mutation before the population is eradicated by that environment, and thus also more likely to pass on the "panic button" alleles/genes.Quite simply, a trait that increased the number of traits which could be selected for, was selected for. Meaning that it propagated through the population, leading to a better survival rate in times of stress.
Evolution itself, in fact, enabling evolution to occur more quickly. At least, that is how I would explain it from the evolutionary perspective. Maybe real professional biologists think otherwise (but it would be cool if they didn't ).

My bad.
So, that paper effectively has beneficial mutations happening more often, simply because they're beneficial?If you're in a bad environment, then any mutation is more likely to be beneficial instead of um, not-beneficial, as compared to an okay or even good environment.Like: if every one of your alleles is perfectly suited to the environment, any change will be harmful ('living fossil' species for example, perfectly adpated to their nche, so they remain unchanged for millenia). If none of your alleles are suited to the environment, you're dead.But if you're only 70% suited, then there's a 70% chance a mutation will be bad (ignoring the whole "no effect" mutations that don't change the protein shape and stuff), which would mean a 30% chance of any mutation being beneficial.
If you're only 30% suited, then there's a 70% chance of a mutation being useful or beneficial. IOW something living in a bad environment/one it is less suited for is more likely to get a good mutation when compared to the same organism in a good environment.So, the closer you are to being suited to the environment, the less likely you are to receive a good mutation. The further you are from being suited, the more likely you are to receive a good mutation. I recall Percy's evo algorithmy thing. That indicated the same effect: as you approach the target, you become less and less able to get good mutations.Which means bacteria in the bad place will of course end up with more beneficial mutations. They hit rock-bottom already, so the only way through is up.If none of that made sense, then great, I'm not a biologist anyway if it did, I do get lucky sometimes.

Or it's found someting that works long enough to allow the next generations to be produced, regardless of which environment it's in.I wouldn't have compared the "panic button" response that the bacteria use to anything in our immune system.
In the latter case, this is a system specifically set up (by whatever means, evolution or Godidit) to fight that stuff off. Naturally there is no point in withholding resources from the organism's defense - there's no point in saving stuff for later, when you're dead later. Hence the immune reaction is to fight until something is dead (if it happens to be you, well, that would have happened if you didn't fight).
However, the bacterial response is to make more mutations. It is not the individual organism that survives more, but the species/population as a whole, because as we all know, you can't create new mutations for yourself once your DNA/RNA is set. The good stuff gets passed on to the next set, just like in regular processes; difference in the "panicked" bacteria is the rate of mutations.Reading that myself, it might not make much sense. Does it for y'all?

Which is exactly what I was aiming for. Maybe I tried talking too much.
The rest of the problems probably derived from my cluelessnes of what the paper said.