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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.
Morphological changes may have been minimal, but I suspect genomic changes have still occurred. Neutral drift alone would assure that these bacteria were not identical at the molecular level to their two billion year old ancestors.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Naturally, the only response possible is, "citation, or it didn't happen."
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I agree with your primary point. However the article does state he analyzed the chemistry too. I wonder how much the chemistry is really going to change if the microbes are pulled from the same environment. I would expect proteins to break down after a couple of billion years.
Schopf used several techniques to analyze the fossils, including Raman spectroscopy — which enables scientists to look inside rocks to determine their composition and chemistry
Most, but not all.
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
In a simple and stable environment, the critters could have adapted a locally optimal form and strategy (given the evolutionary path they had already taken), to the point where all variations reachable from the current form function worse and are selected out. "reachable" is key here. You (your lineage) are very unlikely to evolve into spherical iron rock crystal creatures of roughly the same mass. The relative Kolmogorov complexity to get your form to that form, as well as the energetic infeasibility, mitigate against that direction, no matter how random evolutionary variation is. There are always constraints, not only on survival probability, but also on variation direction possibility.
This has zero to do with religion. It's about combinatorics, complex system constraints, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
How did eyes evolve? The structures are too complex to be accounted for by traditional evolutionary explanation mechanisms.
That old chestnut? Open your eyes.