Thank you for the interesting paper(s).
Note: "Thus, under adverse conditions, cells may use this error-prone polymerase to produce variants that allow their descendents to survive. Indeed, Pol IV, Pol II and Pol V were all shown to be important for the long-term evolution and survival of E. coli (Yeiser et al., 2002)."
The bacteria didn't "decide it needed the mutation". They just respond to adverse conditions by increasing their mutation rate as an adaptive mechanism. Natural Selection in action.
There is no "direction" here, and how does a bacterium "decide" anything?
"The bacteria didn't "decide it needed the mutation". They just respond to adverse conditions by increasing their mutation rate as an adaptive mechanism."
Are you sure about this? Not all genes were mutated, and among the ones mutated included the one that was needed, and the kind of mutation that was needed was the kind induced by the action of the DNA Polymerase.
This seems to me that it would meet the requirements for being an assisted search, not an unaided mutation.
"There is no "direction" here, and how does a bacterium "decide" anything?"
Ummm.. even if you don't agree with my interpretation above, the stress did in fact trigger a specific response mechanism to alter its genome, whether or not you think that this was a blind or assisted search for the proper change.
Likewise, I gave another example earlier how bacteria can modify its genome in response to stress in very specific ways with insertion sequences.
Uh.. ok....