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Deep-Sea Microorganism Hasn't Evolved For Over 2 Billion Years
sfcrazy writes: Evolution is a natural process — everything evolves over a period of time, depending on the environment. But now scientists have discovered an organism which hasn't evolved for over more than 2 billion years. That's almost the half of the life of the Earth. "The scientists examined sulfur bacteria (abstract), microorganisms that are too small to see with the unaided eye, that are 1.8 billion years old and were preserved in rocks from Western Australia’s coastal waters. Using cutting-edge technology, they found that the bacteria look the same as bacteria of the same region from 2.3 billion years ago — and that both sets of ancient bacteria are indistinguishable from modern sulfur bacteria found in mud off of the coast of Chile." Scientists say the extreme stability of the environment around the organisms made further adaptations unnecessary.
Wasps haven't evolved in at least 35 million years....sometimes there is no force nor need for evolution.
When you're perfectly adapted any change is deleterious and will be selected against.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"Changes?! We don't need no stinkin' changes!"
No, not everything evolves.
Things only evolve if there's an environmental pressure that causes it. Otherwise, there's just as much of a likelyhood that they'll stay exactly the same. If an organism is successful and suited well enough to it's environment that it out-competes any altered versions of itself, then it won't change.
Republicans have evolved over the years. At one time, they were the party pushing the Civil Rights act through, while many Democrats opposed it! At one time, they were for Constitutional limitations on federal government. But now they're against those things. Oh wait, that's devolving?
Ask a WASP.
Just because a fossil looks similar does not mean it hasn't evolved. Most evolution happens on the molecular scale, if you looked at the genomes I guarantee they would be different.
They seem to be going by visual appearance. There may be loads of DNA changes that affect metabolism chemistry and behavior that wouldn't be detectable by visual inspection of fossils. Looks can be deceiving.
Also in the TFA: "If they were in an environment that did not change but they nevertheless evolved, that would have shown that our understanding of Darwinian evolution was seriously flawed."
It's possible for a chance mutation or set of mutations to "discover" a new feature even in a stable environment. There are probably always better designs in highly remote combinations of mutations.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't think the nutbars are the most dangerous part of our new Republicans, rather being bitches of big corporate interests. Back when I was young it started, the "Rockefeller Republicans". That kind of shit causes wars of choice and police state.
The original organism could easily have evolved into something else in the time gap and a new organism with very similar characteristics to the original has developed.
There are no activist judges in the ocean!
Every species evolves every time it reproduces.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Is part of evolution
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Gosh, I was worried that people might discuss the science on this thread while totally ignoring the potential to bring partisan US politics into the forefront. Thanks for saving us all from that gruesome fate.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
The result of that evolution hasn't resulted in much morphological change.
Bacteria look very similar to the bacteria 2 billion years ago. But they evolve new defences against immune systems etc, so HAVE evolved significantly. Easy to explain (they have no real morphology as we consider it visually), but it illustrates that you can have huge evolution without having big changes in how things look.
If available spaces don't make a different morphology a better bet but rather a much worse one, then any genetic changes that happen to express morphologically won't survive and the only ones that survive will be genetic changes that are not morphological.
I like saw it on discovery last nite dont tell me no evolve
To summarize: Fossils that look similar "haven't evolved". That is quite possibly the stupidest thing that I read today.
Has our educational system sunk so low that it must be mentions that you need a microscope to see bacteria?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Most, but not all.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
The human as a species is not stabile in any biological sense. To the contrary, it seems as if the genetic drift within the human genome has sped up considerably in the last 5,000 years.
Not so, some are large enough to see with the naked eye: Sogin, Nature, vol. 362, page 207
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I would have thought cow rather than pig. Humans and cows are actually surprising similar genetically, more so than human-rodent. Of course when they mapped the cow genome they used the human genome as a "scaffold", so perhaps that it just some artifact of the method. I do not know enough about it to say. Also all the cows are supposedly descended from the same group of ~80 from around 10.5k years ago.
http://io9.com/5897169/dna-reveals-that-cows-were-almost-impossible-to-domesticate
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=22422765
On the other hand, this similarity between us and domesticated animals could just be due to retroviruses being transferred back and forth. Those supposedly make up a decent minority (>5%) of the human genome, I am not sure about pig/cow.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387345/
How can the prove that the sulfur bacteria has not evolved? Note: They could prove that the sulfur bacteria still exists like it did long ago. But, I see no way they can prove there was NOT failed evolution paths taken in the past. And, I am NOT sure that there has NOT been evolution paths taken in the past that has resulted in bacteria so different that it might not be currently believed they evolved from this sulfur bacteria. Tim S.
But how many? Specifically, what tiny proportion? (Since otherwise, the Ancient Greeks would have discovered them.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
God intended.
proportion?? How many species of bacteria are there? Good luck pulling any kind of proportional measurement. Let's just say a number greater than zero, and you be fucking satisfied with the citation I gave you, hm?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
When Gof created the earth seven thousand years ago he created these bacteria, so of course they are the same bacteria.
Cutting-edge technology like... eyes?
(Apparently, they really did just look at them, leaving the DNA sequencing for later.)
I would have looked in a Senate subcommittee.
Not to mention the giant ones in space.
Researchers say these microscopic organisms are an example of "extreme evolutionary stasis" and represent the greatest lack of evolution ever seen.
They may also, paradoxically, prove that Darwin's theory of evolution is true.
The rule of life is don't fix it if it isn't broken. - William Schopf, UCLA
"If evolution is a product of changes in the physical and biological environment, and there are no changes in the physical and biological environment, then there will be no evolution," said J. William Schopf, a paleobiologist at UCLA.
He calls it the null hypothesis required of Darwin's equation.
In a paper published this week in PNAS, Schopf and his colleagues describe three distinct communities of the deep sea microbes separated from each other in time by hundreds of millions of years.
The first is a fossilized community found in 2.3-billion-year-old rock in Western Australia. The second fossilized community was discovered in 1.8-billion-year-old rock, also from Western Australia. The third is a living community discovered in the last decade in sediments off the west coast of South America.
The researchers say that despite their vast age differences, the three communities look exactly the same, each exhibiting a telltale irregular weblike fabric, and a two-tier structure.
"In form, function and metabolism, they are identical," Schopf said.
It may seem unlikely that any organism can remain the same for 2.3 billion ye
ars, but Schopf said that for these deep sea microbes, the lack of evolution makes sense.
"Surface environments change all the time and when they change, the biology changes," he said. "But the muds underneath the ocean don't receive any signals from the above environment."
The microbes described in the study live 4 to 12 inches beneath the deep sea sediments, in one of the most stable environments on Earth. Their world is cold and dark -- an endless night that feels none of the effects of either ice ages or warming spells.
"There is no turning of sediments, things don't get stirred up, there is no oxygen at all -- they get no time signal, there is no change," said Schopf.
The microbes reproduce asexually, which keeps genetic changes to a minimum, and their simple ecosystem requires only nitrate and sulfur for energy.
"They are well adapted for their environment, and there isn't any competition," Schopf said.
So with no pressure to change, Schopf proposes that these organisms didn't.
"The rule of life is don't fix it if it isn't broken," he said.
Schopf said it is likely that these ancient organisms exist at the bottom of oceans throughout the world, but finding them is difficult and expensive, since it involves drilling into sediments at the bottom of the ocean.
He also said there may be other similarly static communities on our planet. The next place he'd like to look are microbes that live deep in the pore spaces of rocks half a mile beneath the surface of the Earth.
"I suspect that is an environment that hasn't changed much over the history of the Earth," he said.
http://www.latimes.com/science...
From the article: "We have arrived at the chromosome body... in the nucleus of the organism." So this isn't a prokaryote, in fact it is referred to as a space amoeba.
Copy of my post to the /. "Scientist Says Potential Signs of Ancient Life in Mars Rover Photos" http://science.slashdot.org/st...
From a link on microbial lifeforms found on Earth http://www.astrobio.net/news-e... "What’s more, MISS have remained unchanged over the last 3 billion years" MISS: microbially-induced sedimentary structure.
"3 billion years and little if any mutations in a microbe life or it's off spring.
“But it also raised the question: why are they so identical?” she adds. “And what does that mean about the organisms that created them?”"
The journalists reporting on this article don't know the first thing about evolution. First of all, much evolution can happen without a creature's shape changing. Which is especially true when the creature's shape is incredibly, mindnumbingly simple. Secondly, it falsely states that evolution doesn't happen in a stable environment. No, in a stable environment there would simply be less environmental natural selection. This means less selection for things such as changing the thickness of the fur coat to adapt to the temperature. However, there will still be competition within the own species, occasional but far less likely adaptations to the environment, and especially an accumulation random mutations which neither increase nor decrease fitness.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
similar morphology != no evolution
This was the stupidest thing I've read this year..
I'm sure they have evolved in a multitude of ways, most if not all of which don't involve changing shape. At the very least they'll have evolved to combat parasites, viruses, changes in temperature and so on.
Perhaps when those mutations occurred they'd all died, so therefore the only viable survived. Perhaps there's not many configurations allowed in such extremes environments.
A billion year old microorganism found in the deep sea. . . anyone else read Peter Watts rifter series? lol
And people on one continent have different colored skin and eyes than another. Evolution doesn't mean that every member of a species undergoes the same change. it means that some branched off. This deep see microorganism probably has branched but the other branch stayed stock. And this scenario repeated itself over billions of years, giving life to squid, sharks and lions.
Summarizing the methods as "cutting-edge technology" is not science journalism. Reporting should use the terminology utilized by the study authors, or another commonly understood equivalent if such exists.
It would appear that even nature follows this simple rule-of-thumb ;)