Organism Closest To Original "Tree of Life" Discovered 198
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have discovered a benign algae eating protozoan in a lake near Oslo, Norway whose gene sequence does not match any known organism living on earth today, and this beasty combines genetic characteristics across plant, animal, and fungal kingdoms. It is believed to be the closest living organism to the original organisms that spawned all animal life on earth."
Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
So what's the /. UID of this thing?
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oblig. (Score:2, Insightful)
Please EXCUSE my dear Aunt SALLY; -1^.5=-1, but (-1)^.5=i
That depends on his assumption (Score:2)
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
So what's the /. UID of this thing?
Judging by the picture in the article [msn.com], it is none other than Cowboy Neil himself.
Re:Oblig. (Score:2)
Re:Oblig. (Score:2)
T3K3L1-L1 [wikipedia.org]
Re:Oblig. (Score:3)
T3K3L1-L1 [wikipedia.org]
I immediately read that as TK-421.
I know its username! (Score:2)
Swampthing! [wikipedia.org]
Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Funny)
The protozoan was heard shouting "Hey you young species, get off my pond!"
Re:Oblig. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Oblig. (Score:3)
Actually, it should still use the even older Baudot/Murray code, in which /. is 11101 11100. So its /. uid would be 956.
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Informative)
But... but... which day did God create that one again?
The fifth day. "Read your damn Bible."
Re:Oblig. (Score:2)
Not much to add other than a hearty thanks to the moderators that made this +4 informative. Made my day.
Re:Oblig. (Score:2)
I'm glad I posted the original post to see that thing modded "5, Informative". That's science allright !
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oblig. (Score:2)
But what should we do about the acronym for Bible? RTFB is already taken.
Re:Oblig. (Score:2)
Re:Oblig. (Score:2, Informative)
Good point. In the words of Penn Jillette: "We need more atheists — and nothin' will get you there faster than readin' the damn Bible."
Re:Oblig. (Score:2)
Yes, I suggest that all atheists read the Bible cover to cover.
You could just read the New Testament if your attention span is too short.
That would greatly improve the quality of religious posts around here.
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, by definition, a good scientist is good at science. There were deeply religious scientists (Max Planck), there were pathologically paranoid scientists (Kurt Gödel), there were confessedly agnostic scientists (Albert Einstein), there were esoterics (Isaac Newton), pantheists (Gottfried Leibniz) and atheist zealots (Bertrand Russell).
To believe that a scientist has to have a certain worldview to become a good scientist is a religion in itself.
Re:Oblig. (Score:3, Insightful)
You sound just like a fanatical "let's invade churches and call them stupid" Atheist.
I am an Atheist myself. I think Gods are very improbable, and not needed to explain the universe. Thing is, I find bad enough that religious people try to convert me, so I don't do the same, because I don't want people to hate me.
Also, I don't think that religious people are stupid. Maybe they have a reason to believe in a God. Maybe they are afraid of death. Maybe they never gave it a serious thought. There are a lot of reasons why someone would believe in God, and I refuse to believe stupidity is the only one.
That said, I think I'm answering a troll. Well, whatever. I've already written this anyways,
Re:Oblig. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm an agnostic, and I suspect that there are plenty of alien critters far in advance of us who would look pretty godlike if we stared at 'em up close. Might even be a few sentients that survived the creation and destruction of universes and possibly have even influenced same (or started a brand new universe as a gaming platform). Depends on what you think might be godlike.
Re:Oblig. (Score:3, Informative)
I never said religious people are stupid.
I said they were insane.
I said the gods they worship are evil and dangerous to human survival.
That is something very different than calling them stupid.
Re:Oblig. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are completely ignoring the new anti-rationality pro-dark age crusade being waged by the radical christians, islamists, jews and hindu's of the world. Not to mention the christian apocalyptic cults and the general attempt by the faithful to convert or exterminate each other.
Read your bible christian. Beginning to end. Old and new testament and tell me your god isn't a murderous psychopath instituting insane and arbitrary laws and demanding adoration under threat of violence. Your god is an evil god.
Re:Easy Response (Score:3)
Very little evil has been done in the name of atheism. Not even the atrocities of the soviet union and china are done for atheism. They were done for the communist faith, or more accurately the faith in absolute personal authority held by the madmen who came to power.
Re:Oblig. (Score:3)
Actually, you're oversimplifying agnosticism. There are several forms, of which this is just a subset:
Atheist agnosticism - I don't know for sure that there is no God, but there's no proof of one.
Theist agnosticism - I don't know for sure that there is a God, but I believe there is.
Apathetic agnosticism - There may be a God, but he/she/it doesn't care what we do so it doesn't matter.
Strong agnosticism - There's no way for any human to ever have a definitive answer to whether God exists.
Weak agnosticism - I don't know for sure if there is a God, but maybe sometime in the future we'll be able to tell.
Re:Oblig. (Score:3)
"And with regard to the creation of the light upon the first day . . . and of the [great] lights and stars upon the fourth . . . we have treated to the best of our ability in our notes upon Genesis, as well as in the foregoing pages, when we found fault with those who, taking the words in their apparent signification, said that the time of six days was occupied in the creation of the world..."
--Origen of Alexandria
Usher's fault (Score:5, Insightful)
The funny thing is that this literalism is very recent. As per my sig, quoting Tennyson, educated Victorians were already familiar with an enormously expanded timescale and the idea of replacement of species (he was writing in 1844, before Darwin published). And at school we used to sing that Victorian hymn which included the words "A thousand ages in thy sight are like an evening gone" - English protestants had no trouble at all with the idea that the "days" of Genesis were metaphorical
Whether the original writers thought that, of course, is moot. But who did you believe in the early 1800s - a nomadic goat herder or the clever young men at Cambridge who were making such exciting discoveries? And why do apparently educated Americans claim to believe something that was shown to be false over 200 years ago?
Re:Usher's fault (Score:2)
Jesus said, "When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
--Gospel of Thomas
Overall, though, I'm quite in agreement with your post...
Re:Usher's fault (Score:3)
Because there is so much scientific evidence [answersingenesis.org].
This is the seventh day (Score:3)
The whole taking the six days literally thing is a Protestant error.
Especially when you consider that there was no "evening and morning" for the seventh day. This adds more support to the day-age interpretation of Genesis 1 [wikipedia.org]. God has rested; have you joined him in his rest?
Moses (Score:3)
To compound this, there were no "sons of Adam" to act as witnesses to the creation. Where did that knowledge come from?
If you believe tradition, the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses... But he didn't live through Genesis. How did he come to all that knowledge? He could have abridged other writings, but that still doesn't explain the account of the creation. The explanation that makes the most sense? He (or someone else) was told by God or by an angelic messenger. Therein lies the rub.
God has a habit of being intentionally obtuse at times. Every time someone receives a vision in their dreams, and every time a parable is told, there is someone present who will understand the symbolism. Yet most of the time, the message will go right over everyone else's head. One of the great problems with interpreting the Bible has to do with which passages are meant literally, and which are figurative. Most of the time, it's rather obvious, but there's always someone who will get it wrong. With Genesis, it's actually quite hard.
The question isn't: is the creation account symbolic? The question is: How much of the creation account is symbolic, and of what?
(Those who believe every word of the Bible is literal, really should reread the parables of Christ and the dreams interpreted by Daniel. Then they can try to explain why 100% of the other dreams and sayings recorded are all literal.)
So the Universe orbits the sun? (Score:2)
Re:So the Universe orbits the sun? (Score:2)
A day hasn't been defined as a rotation of the Earth for a very long time
The Bible was written "a very long time" ago.
Re:Oblig. (Score:3)
You mean "RTFB"
Re:Oblig. (Score:2)
A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:5, Informative)
Here [oxfordjournals.org]'s the paper.
And to ruin all of the surprise: it's believed to be about a billion years removed from other known protists. That's about the same age as multicellular life. Archaea are more distant from us than these protists.
This is more baseless conjecture than anything, but its blend of unusual genes most likely suggests that it is the sole (optimized) survivor of a larger ecosystem of similar strains, which may have exchanged DNA through some horizontal gene transfer mechanism in the past. The relatedness to a distant organism in Tibet implies that at least one of these species was once geographically ubiquitous, or spread through some other means, and may have blended into its surroundings there.
The measurement of the organism's "age" is based on the sequence of an extremely conserved gene that codes for a part of a very important cell component, the ribosome. That measurement reflects how many times the sequence has been altered since it last matched a suspected common ancestor with its nearest relatives. The researchers never said that it's been essentially the same organism for a billion years (although it looks that way in the summary and MSNBC article); since they only analysed live samples, not fossilized ones, there's no way of knowing (and I'd be sceptical about any claims that said we could sequence billion-year-old DNA.) At any rate, analytical genomics shows us that for the sequence to stay the same for so long, the environment would have to be completely static and the genes very specifically optimised, which was almost certainly not the case due to historical climate trends. The rate of sequence change is very reliable on a large scale.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:3, Funny)
Nice summary though.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:2)
But isn't the protist kingdom generally considered the catch-all group for shit we don't yet know where belong? In that sense it isn't really surprising to for protists to become better classified.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:5, Informative)
In modern classification, there is no Protist kingdom. Protists are polyphyletic, which means they have representatives in many different groups (or Kingdoms, if you want), and each group is linked by a common ancestor. Though they are still working out the actual branches of the Eukarya tree (a lot of the early branching is difficult to resolve because of so much genome re-arranging and duplications, insertions, and deletions), one fairly recent paper suggests at least 6 "Kingdoms": Opisthokonta (which includes fungi, animalia, and some of what were previously thought of as protists), Amoebazoa (amoebas, slime moulds, etc), Archaeplastida (plantae, red algae, and green algae), Chromalveolata, Rhizaria, Excavata, and some groups that aren't clearly in those groups. This paper by Roger and Simpson from 2004 has a good summary:
Simpson, A.G.B. & Roger, A.J., 2004. The real "oekingdoms" of eukaryotes. Current biology, 14(17), p.693-696. Available at: http://kfrserver.natur.cuni.cz/studium/prednasky/bunka/2005/simpson_eukevol.pdf. (PDF link) [natur.cuni.cz]
I'm sure there has been more work since then, but that paper is accessible to non-experts and a good overall read (though I recommend having wikipedia open to see what organisms they are talking about when they list names).
Modern classification is a bit of a mess, because Nature doesn't fit into the neat hierarchical classification system that we grew up with. A good example of this is the idea of the Animal, Fungi, and Plant kingdoms of old. If Animals and Fungi deserve their own kingdoms, then at the same hierarchical level, each plant "phylum" should actually be a kingdom. Or something along those lines. But anyway more modern classification uses monophyletic groups (groups in which all members have a common ancestor; e.g. Eukarya is monophyletic because all eukaryotes share a common ancestor, but Protista is polyphyletic because there are protists which have a more recent common ancestor with animals than they do with other protists).
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About the article, man that thing is a mess. Is it a translation problem, are the journalists who wrote it completely clueless, or are the researchers who discovered this organism extremely out of date with their classification? It reads more like a discovery from 1970 than 2012. :-/
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:5, Funny)
Modern classification is a bit of a mess, because Nature doesn't fit into the neat hierarchical classification system that we grew up with.
Yeah, multiple inheritance is a mess. They should have gone with single inheritance and interfaces instead...
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:3)
nah, duck typing.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:3)
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:2)
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:3)
Why does nature insist on creating new lifeforms individually
Cache locality.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:5, Interesting)
They did, once you get past the cellular stage. Multi-cellular creatures only have single inheritance (from a Pair<T,T>), and pretty much all of them implement the ISexualReproduction interface, though some implementations get really crazy and hacked together [youtube.com] (that's legacy support in action, the slugs only do that because their mating scheme was initially developed for underwater environments and nobody thought to make the code compatible with less-dense atmospheres).
It's just that some single-celled creatures have the crazy horizontal inheritance that causes so many problems in older programming languages; you end up with more of a crazed inheritance shrub, instead of a tree.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:2)
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:3)
But by my ancestors I swear, there will be one someday...
But first, we must take the North.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:2)
But by my ancestors I swear, there will be one someday...
You're gonna need more Pylons.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:2)
Thanks for that article link. It packs a significant amount of clearly written information into four pages. Clearly, Simpson has no future in biological pedagogy.
>About the article, man that thing is a mess. Is it a translation problem, are the journalists who wrote it completely clueless, or are the researchers who discovered this organism extremely out of date with their classification?
In my opinion, the answer to your question is, "Yes."
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:2)
About the article, man that thing is a mess. Is it a translation problem, are the journalists who wrote it completely clueless, or are the researchers who discovered this organism extremely out of date with their classification? It reads more like a discovery from 1970 than 2012. :-/
A little bit of all of them, and the inevitable Chinese whispers you get with Murdochian journalism, where no "journalist" go check the source but only rewrite each other, and a little bit of sensationalism by the original journalist, Ynge Vogt.
The original article can be found in English at the University of Oslo:
http://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/microorganism.html [apollon.uio.no]
What's enlightening by reading this article is that the scientists don't claim that this type of protozoan, collodictyons, is a new discovery (they correctly refer to them being discovered in 1865), but that they have created a new branch for collodictyons.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much. They're a garbage bag of mostly/variably single-celled eukaryotic creatures that don't fit into the traditionally multicellular kingdoms, such as animals, plants, and fungi. It's sort of what you'd be left over with if you took a big, branching tree (all of the eukaryotes) and lopped off large swaths of its branches. Eukaryotes themselves are a chimera-like mix of several bits and pieces (e.g., chloroplasts and mitochondria, which are thought to have been originally independent prokaryotic creatures: look up endosymbiosis [wikipedia.org]). In the real world, classification is messy because life has had a rather complicated history.
Imagine the worst conceivable spaghetti code, built to merely a "good enough to still be self-copyable" code standard, and duplicated (with copy errors), forked (speciated) and merged (endosymbiosis, crossover, and sex) zillions of times with no centralized repository for a few billion years. Then humans come along and try to figure out the code history after the fact, and after 99% of the code has been thrown away (extinct). It isn't going to be pretty. We have a broad outline of the plot to the story, and that's it so far.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:2)
Nice cover of it. Much better than TFS/TFA.
The only thing I'd want to add - while TFS/TFT said origin of the "tree of life" - I believe it would be closest to the eukaryotic branch of the tree. That lines up pretty well with the 1 billion years estimate as well.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:2)
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:4, Funny)
Cthulhu's gunna be pretty mad when he wakes up to find people have tramped through his shrubbery.
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:5, Funny)
Cthulhu's gunna be pretty mad when he wakes up to find people have tramped through his shrubbery.
You mean then that dead Cthulhu's first words upon waking from a pleasant dream in his house at R'lyeh will be, "Hey! You damned kids get off my lawn!!"
Re:A bit of explanation to save you from RTFAing (Score:2)
Re: Organism Closest To Original "Tree of Life" Di (Score:2)
Organism Closest To Original "Tree of Life" Discovered
Eating of its fruit doesn't confer immortality per se, but many congenital defects abate, the skin regains elastin and the libido is enhanced significantly.
Re: Organism Closest To Original "Tree of Life" Di (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, we already know what fruit the Tree of Life gave. It's the banana—haven't you seen the totally informative and 100% factual [youtube.com] explanation of how perfect it is?
...
...
I eagerly await to see how many moderators and respondents do not realise that this post is sarcastic.
Re: Organism Closest To Original "Tree of Life" Di (Score:2)
Oh dear.
I'm not sure which was worse: the title, the reasoning, or the fact that I counted the number of single entendres in the low single digits.
Love the way he aims it, phaser-like, at the viewer as he completes his delivery of the opening line.
Re: Organism Closest To Original "Tree of Life" Di (Score:2)
really? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't say I know a great deal about this area but it strikes me that "gene sequence does not match any known organism living on earth today" is not appropriate, seeing as we know so very little about what is crawling around the deepest parts of our oceans. It could well be this Norwegian fellow is quite ordinary.
Re:really? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, your problem is with the fact that it doesn't match any known organism, because we don't know what else might be out there?
Re:really? (Score:2)
What a novel definition of "wise"!
Re:really? (Score:2)
Well, didn't a wise man once say that there were "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns"?
Only a fool would call the man who said that "wise". He was cunning and evil, not wise. If he were wise we'd have never invaded Iraq.
Re:really? (Score:2)
Pretty stupid shit when you realize it means I can tell the author of these quotes that I'm a purple goddess with 3 titties that loves watching football and cooking him things, when in reality I'm none of those things. But, he doesn't know there are things he doesn't know, and there's a distinct lack of evidence I'm not what I just said I was, so.... fap away, Mr Rumsfeld, you dipshit.
Wrong headline! (Score:5, Informative)
It might be a basal eukaryote, but that does not make it basal life, i.e. bacteria and archaea were present on Earth for ~2 billion years before eukaryotes came about..
Pak Protectors? (Score:2)
Does this mean we are going to be overun with Pak Protectors.
So does this mean... (Score:3)
They compared its genome with those in hundreds of databases around the world, with little luck. In all that looking they "have only found a partial match with a gene sequence in Tibet.
Is it part of the Rinpoche system? The next Dali Lama perhaps?
Read it wrong... (Score:2)
...and I keep reading it wrong?! Orga*NI*sm damnit... Orga*NI*sm! Read either way there is some truth to the "tree of life" thing but still.
Re:Read it wrong... (Score:3)
Re:Read it wrong... (Score:4, Funny)
[music]...breakin' up is hard to do... [/music]
No! Bad Summary! (Score:4, Informative)
From The Herp Derp Summary:
this beasty combines genetic characteristics across plant, animal, and fungal kingdoms
This is never actually mentioned in the article, in fact...
From TFA (emphasis mine):
They found it doesn't genetically fit into any of the previously discovered kingdoms of life. It's an organism with membrane-bound internal structures, called a eukaryote, but genetically it isn't an animal, plant, fungi, algae or protist (the five main groups of eukaryotes).
To me, at least, that doesn't say that it necessarily has characteristics from all of those kingdoms, and certainly doesn't imply that it "combines" them.
Horrible, ambiguous, summary (Score:4, Insightful)
...benign algae eating protozoan...
So was it: ...) ...) ... [newspaper headline style])
1) a protozoan that eats benign algae (a benign-algae-eating protozoan
2) a benign protozoan that eats algae (a benign, algae-eating protozoan
3) a benign algae that was observed eating a protozoan (a benign algae, eating protozoan,
Re:Horrible, ambiguous, summary (Score:2)
So was it: ...) ...) ... [newspaper headline style])
1) a protozoan that eats benign algae (a benign-algae-eating protozoan
2) a benign protozoan that eats algae (a benign, algae-eating protozoan
3) a benign algae that was observed eating a protozoan (a benign algae, eating protozoan,
Add a 'Cowboy Neal' option (make your own protozoan joke) and we may just have the next Slashdot Poll...
descent trees difficult with horizontal evolution (Score:2)
evolution both complexifies and simplifies (Score:5, Informative)
just in case (Score:2)
the problem with our protozoan overlords (Score:2)
is that they're the cast of Jersey Shore.
New Kingdom? (Score:2)
Re:Very interesting (Score:5, Funny)
I think from tfs, it is safe to say it is not a new form of life...
Re:Very interesting (Score:5, Informative)
It's not even a new discovery - it was discovered late 19th century, i.e. more than a century ago. And not in Norway either.
What the Norwegian scientists do is study them closer, using a local lake as a source.
So, another Slashdot summary that's dead wrong. It can't get any worse without a bikini clad lady on page six.
Re:Very interesting (Score:2)
It's not even a new discovery - it was discovered late 19th century, i.e. more than a century ago.
Protozoans were discovered 150 years ago, but they have been hard to investigate. It seems that there may be several different groups that are all classified protozoans, some may be very different from others -- RTFA.
Re:Very interesting (Score:2)
Protozoans were discovered 150 years ago, but they have been hard to investigate. It seems that there may be several different groups that are all classified protozoans, some may be very different from others -- RTFA.
RTFA yourself. This is a collodictyon, which were first described by H. J. Carter in 1865:
Collodictyon, nov. gen. C. triciliatum, nov. sp.
Pyriform, straight, or slightly bent upon itself, bifid at the small extremity, presenting at the larger one an indentation, from which spring three cilia. Structure transparent, cancellated, composed of globular cells, whith a strongly marked, grenish granule here and there in the triangular spaces between them. Locomotive, swimming by means of the cilia; subpolymorphic, flexible, yielding, capable of assuming a globular form . . . or one more or less modified by the body it may incept . . . ; enclosing crude material for noourishment in stomachal spaces, and ejecting the refuse, like Amoeba. Provided with a nucleus and contracting vesicles.
Previous findings include Bombay and Central Europe, and what was found in Norway some 20 years ago is just another variety of Collodictyons. What's new is the study of them enabled by a local source, and potential classification as the most remote type of eukaryotes.
can't get any worse without a bikini clad lady... (Score:2)
a bikini clad slime mold on page six?
that would be worse
Re:Very interesting (Score:2)
It can't get any worse without a bikini clad lady on page six.
Sounds like an April fools prank to play, but for more effect have it be a ./ calendar.
Re:Get to the point! (Score:3)
Re:Get to the point! (Score:2)
Re:Get to the point! (Score:2)
one of the earliest forms of life requires a host for breeding.
really?
Pop-culture reference. Plus current zeitgeist.
Re:Not so quickly... (Score:2)
Re:Not so quickly... (Score:2)
Mary?? As in "Virgin Mary?" You had that god all right!
Re:Elder Gods (Score:2)
Hail Atlantis! "Way down...below the ocean..."
Re:Misleading title (Score:3)
Why would that be neat? Wanna keep it for a pet? Wanna show the neighbors that you're "cultured?"
Re:please (Score:2)
If this is what all life originated from how did the original organism stay the same over millions of years but at the same time evolve into all living life with no signs at all of anything intermediate?
There was once a family of spearmakers. They were very good at making spears, and people would come from miles around to buy their spears. Because they were so good, the family prospered and multiplied. Then someone invented the sword, and the market for spears dropped, so half the family started making swords. They were very good at making swords, and people would come from miles around to buy their swords. Because they were so good, the family prospered and multiplied. Then someone invented the pistol, and half the family started making pistols. They were very good at making pistols, and people would come from miles around to buy their pistols. Because they were so good, the family prospered and multiplied. This family is now one of the biggest small-arms manufacturers in their country. Somewhere along the line, the branch that continued to produce swords stopped. And yet away in a little mountain village, there's a man descended from the original spear-makers who continues to make traditional spears as ornaments, film props and tourist souvenirs....
Re:please (Score:2)
Someones been reading to man Cussler novels
Re:please (Score:2)
A weapons analogy? C'mon, you're supposed to use cars!
(very good analogy though)
Re:The two main problems with TFA (Score:3)
1.Assuming we all evolved from a universal common ancestor we are all equidistant to the original tree of life
That depends entirely on your metric. If it's by years, we're equidistant. If it's by genetic difference, we're pretty far away from the origin, and this things pretty close. If it's by generations, we're pretty close, and it's pretty far away. (Human mean-time-to-reproduction in the order of decades, primitive cellular culture mean-time-to-reproduction in the order of seconds.)
Re:The two main problems with TFA (Score:2)
No. You are missing the point. It has evolved just as much as anyone else, just in a different direction.
The importance is that this split off a long time ago, so any conserved commonalities will be very significant.
FWIW, the ancestral organism can't have been an oxygen breather. Didn't check whether this was or not. But just being anaerobic doesn't mean you haven't been evolving. And this one's even a eukaryote, so it's not as far divergent as, say, a blue-green algae.
OTOH, the headline appears to drasticly oversell. This is just a protozoa that they've sequenced the genome of (according to the link). Apparently they've had problems getting enough DNA before now. And I suspect the reporter didn't really understand what she was being told. Either that, or she just likes to write down to her audience.
Re:The two main problems with TFA (Score:2)