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And what is your argument or agreement with Shapiro and Schwartz? I am unclear as to the point you were attempting to make by bringing in Shapiro's work.

If you couldn't tell, I agree with Shapiro and, by the argument, with Schwartz. I brought up Shapiro as an "I told you so". Although Schwartz characterizes the external agent, it is the cell that responds to the external stimuli. We know the cell is alive. Is the external stimulus alive?

No I could not tell. Not enough context or narrative in that post to tell, at least for me. It seemed to me that you were using Shapiro to show that rates of obsevable mutation were higher than Schwartz's assertion that the cells resist mutation would allow.

I agree that individual cells strongly resist change from the status quo ante. Such an effect at the cell level works against mutation driven evolution. I added that organisms made of cells ADD levels and orders of magnitude of resistance to change, to mutations. So there is a even much stronger resistance to change driven by mutation the more complex the organism. I then added even further -- that cells and organisms both act to redefine the statsis and dynamic of their enviroment so as to cause that surrounding enviroment to actively promote the comfort and benefit and defend the status quo of the organism, or cell. Ecosystem fights and eradicates strange (mutational) change to the utmost degree. I suspect that is true, perhaps even truer, when the dynamics of competition are factored in, just from studies in closed feedback dynamic systems. Feedback in systems theory is like competition in biology. Or rather, to get the order right, biological competition appears to me to be akin to a feedback in a hypothetic closed dynamic model. It would agressively police the steady state, as such feedbacks in stable systems do.

In such dynamic systems, Darwin's theorized stepwise refinemnet by micro-mutation has no place. It is always forcibly rejected.

Yet Shapiro's theory has some merit to my intution. It also seems to my mind to mesh with a talmudic wisdom that G-d always provides for the cure before the disease is introduced, the creation of an antidote preceeds the mixing of poison.