There is no doubt that there are stress induced mechanisms that increase mutation rates, but there is little or no evidence of the sort of specific targeting that Cairns' model hypothesised.
With regard to Herebedragons problem with the availability of the primary literature, one big advantage in recent years to the lay person with an interest is the increasing availability of Open Access publications of high quality research such as PLOS and the BioMedCentral publications. Along with this many traditional journals are now making their articles Open Access after a given period of time.
Two examples of open access material dealing with adaptive mutation are a review of various forms of stress induced mutatgenesis (
Foster, 2007), and some recent primary research on how a specific form of stress can lead to adaptive mutations when one major element of one of the most common stress induced mutational pathways is knocked out (
Stoebel et al., 2009).
The Entrez database has a whole collection of searchable Open Access articles known as
'Pubmed Central'. So while access to any specifc article on a topic may be a problem there is certainly a good chance you will be able to find many papers on a topic available under some sort of Open Access.
TTFN,
WK