"Woese is postulating a golden age of pre-Darwinian life, during which horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. Evolution was a communal affair, the whole community advancing in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared."

If I may be so bold, ALSO Tripe. Surely it is apparant that "The clever catalytic processes" were not inherited by all of the microbes at once. How does a one celled organism know which genes to inherit? Obviously it doesn't. Occams razor suggests that the selection mechanism was that the microbes with the better genes outbred and crowded out those without them, Darwinian evolution.