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".

Nothing to see here...

This happens on Slashdot all the time.

Move along...

Yeah...

...but they're all female.

Re:Yeah...

Females that haven't had sex in millions of years. I moving there. I could get laid.

Re:Yeah...

That's not what your girlfriend says. :-D

About the title...

I would have found "Organism Survives Without Orgasm" at least a hundred times more entertaining :)

Re:About the title...

Funny, I initially read it as 'Orgasm Survives 100 Million Years Without Sex'.

Bio Class Mistake

It's a bad idea to read "organism" as "orgasm" when you're reading out loud for a class.

Re:About the title...

Dunno.. maybe it helped if you were a little bit more specific ?

Re:About the title...

would it help if I mentioned that I'm a girl?

Well, then we would at least know for sure you're lying.

Re:About the title...

because the female orgasm is a myth...

Indeed

Sounds a lot like my marriage...

The greying of slashdot

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.

Re:The greying of slashdot

and the spammers know it too. No more 'hot young co-eds crave your spunk' and 'naughty schoolgirls need your discipline', but "horny housewives need satisfaction" and "needy mature office ladies", plus medication adverts for all manner of ailments of the aging. The median age for geeks is on the rise!

Re:Nothing to see here...

I wonder how low this organism's slashdot id is.

Re:Nothing to see here...

My wife is eight months pregnant, so I can relate to this organism.

Wait... you've gone a hundred million years without sex, and your wife is preggers?

I'd stop trusting the UPS guy if I were you.

Welcome to slashdot

It should be right at home here.

Re:Welcome to slashdot

"It should be right at home here."

The article says that all of the bdelloid rotifers are females.

Your point is refuted.

Re:Welcome to slashdot

Am I the only slashdotter who gets laid on a regular basis? Feels like it sometimes.

But - 100 million years without sex. That's gotta suck... or NOT!

Presumably, it's not your original sense of humor that you rely on in these matters.

Re:Welcome to slashdot

At this point it's more of an in-joke than an actual lamenting of our lonely state. There's a canonical geek out there we all think of fondly, and perhaps we even were that guy at some point, even if we've grown out of it now. Slashdot is much more diversified than it used to be.

Re:Welcome to slashdot

Yeah I used to think how awesome it is to not be one of those lonely slashdot guys who has a redundant penis.

Then I hit the 3'rd year of being with my girlfriend, anyone want a redundant penis?

Re:Welcome to slashdot

Redundant penis? Is that like a penis array? A Redundant Array of Inexpensive Penises? Wait... that doesn't sound right...

Re:Welcome to slashdot

A Redundant Array of Inexpensive Penises

That's Slashdot for you..

Re:Welcome to slashdot

The optimal situation is to get the sex and not have the girlfriend.

I wouldn't call masturbation optimal...

Re:Welcome to slashdot

The optimal situation is to get the sex and not have the girlfriend.

I wouldn't call masturbation optimal...

Well, how about a boyfriend?

Re:Welcome to slashdot

Sex is like bridge. You don't need a partner if you have a good hand.

Re:Welcome to slashdot

At this point it's more of an in-joke than an actual lamenting of our lonely state. There's a canonical geek out there we all think of fondly, and perhaps we even were that guy at some point, even if we've grown out of it now. Slashdot is much more diversified than it used to be.

And the fact that it has become slightly more socially acceptable to be geeky lately.

But aside from that, I'm sure that a lot of women have fallen for slashdot readers precisely because we do have a few things going for us.

1.) We don't think we are god's gift to women, or that we would totally rock if we were on MTV'sTheGrind or whatever. Despite the shortcomings this implies, this means that typically the geek will make a better lover than the frat boy, because he's actually looking for the response from his lover. In short, geeks try harder, and frat boys don't think they have to try at all.

2.) We masturbate. Say what you want, but masturbation is a GOOD THING. The way to become a more effective lover is PRACTICE. And people who masturbate know what gets them off. Just like it's dangerous to assume that being in a relationship with a (member of the preferred sex) will make you a whole person, you shouldn't go into a sexual relationship with the expectations that movies and TV give us. The secret to a good sex life? Non-interdependence.

Go get 'em, tiger.

~Wx

Re:Welcome to slashdot

Hey, shower in prison doesn't count.

Let me guess...

...it's married.

Finally, my 15 minutes of fame

It is gratifying to see an article about me, but why did they add in the irrelevant stuff about bdelloid rotifers?

Blue Balliticus

Is that what you would name this micro-organism?

Is it only me...

...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...

Obligatory Joke

From the look of those mandibles, it's the foreplay that kills 'em.

...Huh?

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.

Gene Transfer?

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.

Nerd trifecta

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 [suck.com]

Doesn't seem so funny now, does it?

Re:Nerd trifecta

That's not a very good parody of Slashdot. There's no dupe on the front page!

Blisters

Of course, it had one hellashish case of masterbation blisters....

Orgasm vs. Organism

Did anyone else read that headline as "Orgasm Survives 100 Million Years Without Sex?" That'd be a pretty impressive feat!

so what?

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.'

Silly reporter, sex is not required

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.

Trust me

it just seemed like a 100 million years.

Horribly misreported

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.

Living Louse

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.

Re:Slashdotters

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.

Re:Slashdotters

Well, clearly sex isn't the only way to achieve diversification.

It's just more fun that way.

Sex and Diversity

On a serious note, no sex, no evolution

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:

• Mutation. A stray cosmic ray, or bit of radiation hitting the DNA at just the right spot.
• Virus. A virus could inject a change into the DNA strand of the organism.
• Hijacking. Perhaps the organism can take DNA strands from its food, or from another organism and combine them with its own.
• Pre-encoding. The DNA of the organism may actually encode enough information to build several versions of the creature, and which version gets built is random, or determined by the environment, or is cyclical (the way that certain characteristics skip generations).

... or perhaps the creatures are slipping off for a "quickie" while the scientists aren't looking.

Re:Sex and Diversity

For God's sake, I had to get through 3/4 of the page before I finally found a post that was on-topic. :P

One should note that there are higher organisms that are parthenogenic as well -- for example, some species of whiptail lizards. Interestingly enough, they often still have to "mate" (even though they're all females) in order to induce ovulation and thus pregnancy. As for the dominant theories considering them:

"One suggestion is that the parthenogenic species are newcomers on the scene, having existed for only hundreds of years, rather than the hundreds of thousands or millions of years of most reptile species (Wright, 1993). It is noted that the geographic ranges of parthenogenic whiptails is significantly less than that of bisexual species (Schall, 1993). Perhaps the parthenogens haven't been around long enough to displace their bisexual competitors.

Another suggestion is that the parthenogenic species are opportunistic 'weeds,' adaptable enough to quickly exploit new or disturbed ecosystems. In support of this hypothesis is the fact that the reproductive capacity per generation for an all female population is (nominally) double that of a population comprising half males. The studies reported in the present work were not of long enough duration to convincingly confirm or refute this notion. The issue remains unresolved. "

(from http://home.pcisys.net/~dlblanc/articles/whiptail. php [pcisys.net])
I don't know how long it's been since they diverged, though. Sexual selection and the horizontal genetic drift it allows is an "aid" to evolution, but it's not necessary.

Re:About time they got around to this study!

Maybe it only seems like 100 million years. Either way, I can sympathize. I, too, tell myself that I have evolved.

Re:Scientific name

Do you even know what murder means?

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. ...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.

Re:Scientific name

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.