I've switched it to the abstract on the Pubmed site, thanks for the heads-up.
Thanks.
The news reporter possibly wasn't following very well. The abstract seems to be rather different from what the news article reported. That gives me a chance to re-assess the work. I'm still guessing. Access to the complete article would be better.
From what I can see with the abstract, and with some reading between the lines, it looks as if the authors are proposing that a species builds up variation in the DNA, but in a manner such that the variants are mostly unexpressed within the organisms in the species. As a consequence we might say that a population builds up a reservoir of potential variation that could be used at some future time.
Then under some circumstances -- the author suggests stress -- there can be a reorganization of the DNA, whereby a lot of this variation is now expressed. That would allow for relatively rapid evolution. It might still take a number of generations for the reorganized DNA to establish a new stasis. This could account for punctuated equilibrium.
Maybe I read too much between the lines. In any case, if that is what the authors are suggesting, it sounds about right to me. It's pretty close to my own personal theory of how it works. And, as far as I can tell, it is different from what is the traditional neo-Darwinist view.
If my reading is not too far out, then this won't be a threat to evolutionary biologists. It could be a bit of a problem for Dawkins and to a few other neo-Darwinian theorists, as it seems to be opposed to their view of the underlying processes of evolution.
It might be a bit of a problem for creationists. The best thing creationists have had going for them, is that the traditional neo-Darwinist mechanism of statistical filtering of genes has seemed to some people (Fred Hoyle, a number of mathematicians) as too weak to account for the actual evolution that is seen. If Maresca and Schwartz are proposing a more powerful mechanism for change, and one that will more obviously produce the punctuated equilibrium seen in the fossil record, then the best argument of creationists will have been rendered void.