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An international team of scientists has discovered the greatest absence of evolution ever reported—a type of deep-sea microorganism that appears not to have evolved over more than 2 billion years. But the researchers say that the organisms' lack of evolution actually supports Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. The findings are published online today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists examined sulfur bacteria, 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.
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-scientists-hasnt-evolved-billion-years.html
[Abstract]: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/27/1419241112
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Tuesday February 03 2015, @07:50PM
Just because in their case it has not resulted in significant changes to gross morphology in no way means it has not been evolving.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 03 2015, @08:52PM
However, the scientists are proposing that the environmental changes are negligible for such creatures, whereas our environment has changed quite a lot in the same timeframe. Therefore it is to be expected that we will have evolved more than them. Which is evidenced in what's known about our phenotypes over the billennia (there's probably no such word, but there ought to be).
Punctuated equilibrium is permitted to have arbitrarily long periods of equilibrium. Some even say that equilibrium is the norm, the punctuations are the unusual state.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by Arik on Tuesday February 03 2015, @09:35PM
You realize they live on the same planet we do, right?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday February 04 2015, @08:25AM
You realise our planet has many widely varying environments, right? Why don't you move to the Arctic, the bottom of the Mariana Trench, or the middle of Death Valley? It's the same planet.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday February 04 2015, @10:48AM
SN site perl coders - is the <sarcasm> tag supposed to work, as, according to 'preview', it doesn't.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday February 03 2015, @09:01PM
These creatures have evolved just as much...
How do you define the amount of evolution a creature has undergone?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday February 07 2015, @04:25AM
By this definition it should be possible to show what they are claiming - long term lack of evolution - but their evidence does not actually support it. Again, they have no genetic data. They are comparing gross morphology visually.
What I actually meant is slightly different - their evolutionary history is just as long as ours. Its evolution may well have been extraordinarily slow - but the stable morphology only suggests and certainly does not demand that conclusion. Heck it may not be stable morphology at all, the population could have been wiped out completely a dozen times and then a new population evolved into the same shape each time. These are bacteria we are talking about. We have the modern DNA but no ancient DNA to compare it to, and even with large vertebrates judging descent by gross morphology has proven to be less than perfectly accurate.
All known life has the same ultimate ancestor and therefore the same start point and the exact same length of evolutionary history, whatever its current form.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?