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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: 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.
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