Damned if I can find that exact article but I will. It was new research that found that if an environmental change occurred and survival of an organism required that organism to change somewhat. Grow a longer neck, run faster, etc, then general understanding was that via a general rate of mutation these traits would eventually be acquired over time relative to a neutral mutational rate.
But what they found was that the DNA ramped up mutations over and above the neutral rate, in some cases by a very considerable amount. In other words the area of the DNA that selected for neck length somehow registered a need and fired off in that specific area.
The implications here are that if conditions changed, such as an extinction event, then what was left had greatly increased rates of evolution to enter all the new environmental niches.
The 3 articles above are very interesting and dance around this new research but they are not specifically what I was looking for.
It seems that DNA may be somehow reactive to need.
