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Organism Survives 100 Million Years Without Sex
zyl0x writes "The Times has an interesting article online on the discovery of a 100-million-year-old micro-organism which has survived its entire lifespan without sex." From the article "A tiny creature that has not had sex for 100 million years has overturned the theory that animals need to mate to create variety. Analysis of the jaw shapes of bdelloid rotifers, combined with genetic data, revealed that the animals have diversified under pressure of natural selection. Researchers say that their study "refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species".
This happens on Slashdot all the time.
Move along...
It should be right at home here.
...it's married.
It is gratifying to see an article about me, but why did they add in the irrelevant stuff about bdelloid rotifers?
Is that what you would name this micro-organism?
Previewing comments are for sissies!
While 100 million years seems like a long time, perhaps it is married and has a wife. That would explain everything.
I see they finally studied the mating habits of the married American male...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
...who read this as a single organism living for 100 million years without having sex? First part said "wow", second part made me feel like I had been out-geeked...
Great Intellect...
From the look of those mandibles, it's the foreplay that kills 'em.
actually, the main point of the story is that it has changed, has evolved. There is no reason to believe that evolution stops if there is no sex, natural selection is quite happy to use mutation as a tool for evolution, just as it does sex. The difference being that sex tends to speed the process up with different combinations of genes with most offspring.
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Who ever said sex was necessary for diversity? It just speeds it up - what's the big deal about this discovery? There are a crazy number of organisms that don't have sex and have changed a hell of a lot over time.
It was discovered wearing a ratty linux t-shirt.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. Seriously however the article was very unclear. What is it that asexual organisms aren't able to do? Surely it isn't that they can't diversify into different species. After all every organism on earth is descended from the same intial life form and some organisms are still asexual hence establishing that the initial lifeform diversified into some progenitor sexual organism as well as branches that remained asexual.
My best guess as to the claim made in the article is that multi-celluar organisms require sexual reproduction to select for organism wide traits. Not sure why it would be true (maybe different cells don't have enough incentive to look out for the whole organism) but that's my best guess.
Anyway saying that the organism doesn't have sex isn't very clear. Many bacteria exchange genetic material without having sex. Such a system might let this creature gain some of the benefits of sexual selection.
Does anyone understand what this article is actually trying to say? I know it's a funny title but some info would be nice too.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Front page stories
* Dungeons & Dragons and IT
* Organism Survives 100 Million Years Without Sex
* Gifted Children Find Heavy Metal Comforting
Did anyone see suck's parody of slashdot?
http://www.suck.com/daily/99/12/13/daily.html
Doesn't seem so funny now, does it?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Of course, it had one hellashish case of masterbation blisters....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Did anyone else read that headline as "Orgasm Survives 100 Million Years Without Sex?" That'd be a pretty impressive feat!
is it wonderful how conveniently human thinking settles down into two discrete groups like that.
You can tell everything about what a person believe and thinks simply by asking him who he intends to vote for
Do you even know what murder means?
...that's another embryo aborted. In your opinion we are all genocidal maniacs, since we could have all reproduced millions of times but have not (something to do with rape laws) and so millions of embryo's have been effectively aborted via periods which could have otherwise formed children.
How on earth can you kill someone who hasn't even been born yet?
Next you'll be saying woman who have periods are murderers.
...but they're all female.
I actually don't see what the big f**king deal is. If you understand evolution, you probably know that natural selection does not depend on sexual reproduction. It just depends on reproduction, period. It's not as if this single, individual organism has lived 100 million years; its asexual offspring have lived that long, and any time in asexual reproduction, mutations can also occur. I repeat, IT IS NOT SPECIFIC TO SEXUAL REPRODUCTION.
I would fathom that mutation might happen more often with sexual reproduction, and thus asexual reproduction could slow the pace of evolution, but again, that's not to say it doesn't happen. Because it very surely does, as we know from the mutation of all those single-celled asexual organisms we know about. Like every disease out there. It is absolutely nonsense to claim otherwise. Bacteria multiply asexually. Protists do too. This is why diseases resist new drugs. Countless species of plants reproduce asexually. Myriad species of all these kingdoms have survived for 100 million years.
The headline might as well be, 'there has been life on Earth a long time.'
Take off every sig. For great justice.
This discovery doesn't refute anything. Sex has never been a requirement for diversification. That's just silly. Single celled organisms reproduce clonally, and there are millions of species. (they do utilize gene transfer, but that isn't the same as sexual reproduction)
Inheritable differences and selection are sufficient. Mutation is a fine source of inheritable differences. Sex allows greater rates of diversity and retention in the population of undesirable traits that are not dominant for longer, allowing them time to mutate into something useful or show up when environmental factors make them useful. Sexual reproduction is far and away the most common mode in multicellular organisms, probably because it helps the species be resilient to environmental changes. But it isn't required.
it just seemed like a 100 million years.
I would have found "Organism Survives Without Orgasm" at least a hundred times more entertaining :)
Researchers say that their study "refutes the idea that sex is necessary for diversification into evolutionary species".
I have never even heard the idea (during a degree in genetics) that sex is necessary for diversification into species. Bacteria do not have sex (although they can share DNA through other means, such as plasmids) and yet that are incrediably diverse and continue to evolve rapidly (e.g. antibiotic resistance). Therefore, if sex were necessary for speciation we would only have one species of bacteria.
The term "evolutionary species" is also strange. All "species" are by definition "evolutionary", since that is the process by which individual species arise.
Sounds a lot like my marriage...
welcome our abstinent 100-million year old micro-organic losers *cough* overlords.
Well, clearly sex isn't the only way to achieve diversification.
It's just more fun that way.
Two sister species were found to be living together on the body of a water louse. One of them specialised in living around the louse's legs and the other stayed close to the chest. And I thought I had a crappy dorm room.
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
The purpose of sexual reproduction (mitosis) is to blend genetic traits, and thus diversify the species. However, I can think of a number of ways that genes can be modified without mitosis:
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It's a bad idea to read "organism" as "orgasm" when you're reading out loud for a class.
Do you even know what murder means?
Murder means unlawful killing of a human being.
Since in many jurisdictions abortion is not unlawful, it cannot be murder there, although the fetus is obviously a human being. Both sides of the abortion debate are playing silly games with language, cowardly retreating behind abstractions that hide the moral realities. The anti-abortion side falsely try to conclude that the simple fact of being human and innocent is sufficient to warrant extreme social sanctions against being killed, which any innocent young man who has ever been drafted will know is a novel and rarely seen idea. In moronic response to this the pro-choice side declare against all evidence that the fetus is not, in fact, a human being, which makes one wonder what kind of a being it is?
Anyone sane looking at the issue would conclude that: a) a fetus is human and b) killing humans is sometimes justified although always unfortunate and c) in early pregnancy the person who is in the best position to decide if her child would be better off dead is the child's mother. Virtually every human society has practiced some form of infanticide, and infanticide by vacuum suction curatage is a much kinder and more human alternative than anything else that has ever been done.
If you're looking for a grand principle to justify the killing of unwanted children while still in the womb it is simple: every child should be a wanted child, and it is a far greater crime to bring a child into the world unwanted than it is to kill a child in the early stages of gestation, and it is the child's mother who is both in the best position to judge and the only position to act on such a choice.
The abortion debate is populated by two kinds of people: those who see boundaries everywhere, and those who see no boundaries whatsoever. On the one hand, there are those who purport to be unable to tell the difference between a week-old fetus and a year-old baby. On the other, there are those who claim that a baby a week before birth is completely unrelated in every respect to a baby a week after birth. Both groups of people are idiots, and I would dearly love to see them apply the same style of logic to every other aspect of their lives, so they could drive their cars off the road (being unable to tell where the edge is because there is no infinitely sharp division) or wake up each morning wondering where they are, because their house has more dust in it than when they went to bed and so must be a completely different place.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
There's no denying it. We're getting older. There are now more jokes about wives not having sex than there are about parent's basements.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton