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Australia News Science

Deep-Sea Microorganism Hasn't Evolved For Over 2 Billion Years 138

Posted by Soulskill from the billions-and-billions dept.
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.
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Deep-Sea Microorganism Hasn't Evolved For Over 2 Billion Years More

Deep-Sea Microorganism Hasn't Evolved For Over 2 Billion Years

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  • Wasps haven't evolved in at least 35 million years....sometimes there is no force nor need for evolution.

      • Hmmm ... I don't think WASP means what it think it means. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant is typically used to describe lacoste clad and teeth whitened mcMansion types, not bible banging NASCAR fans
    • ~2.3 billion years > ~35 million years. Just saying...

      • A wasp is a very complex multicellular organism though, and yet it stopped evolving so long ago. The american alligator species is 150 million years old !

        • and yet it stopped evolving so long ago.

          This is extremely implausible. I suspect you have been the victim of the misreporting of the actual science results. As I elaborate in my comment on your FP.

          • Very plausible and peer reviewed fact. the world between your ears has nothing to do with reality.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 )

        Catch though, it is bacteria and due to a fairly short evolutionary scale, you can not assume it is in fact the same as the original and in fact might have evolved more than once. Of course just because it looks the same does not mean it worked the same or that the DNA matches. Appearances can be deceiving.

        • I totally agree! :D As a third point, the different bacteria could have evolved separately and got to the same point. as an example, flies, birds, and bat are all different, they all evolved and formed wings.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by GNious ( 953874 )

        ~2.3 billion years > ~35 million years > 6000 years old planet

        • Goddish idiots like you shouldn't be allowed to use modern technology. Like medicine, or electricity.
        • If you really think the bible's representation of age and time is literal then I'm sorry but you are just as knowledgeable as people 2000 years ago.

    • Re:Plenty of other creatures haven't "evolved" (Score:5, Informative)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:16PM (#48974603) Journal

      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.

      • I would think that any organism would seek a better or easier path and perhaps come back to center as no gain was found but I think the drift would be endless even if the return to center is endless. Otherwise we would have to explain the ability of an organism to simply be content and intelligent enough to stop trying to change.Other than a decision making process the only other explanation might be divine intervention.

        • Re:Plenty of other creatures haven't "evolved" (Score:4, Insightful)

          by jdschulteis ( 689834 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @11:41PM (#48976255)

          I would think that any organism would seek a better or easier path and perhaps come back to center as no gain was found but I think the drift would be endless even if the return to center is endless. Otherwise we would have to explain the ability of an organism to simply be content and intelligent enough to stop trying to change.Other than a decision making process the only other explanation might be divine intervention.

          There is no seeking, no contentedness, no intelligence, no decision making process, and no divine intervention.

          There is only a stable environment, in which no mutations have occurred that conferred a reproductive advantage.

          There is beauty in simplicity.

      • [..] 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.

        I would put good money on this being true. Not my normal "1 pint" bet, but this time a whole hangover!

    • Re:Plenty of other creatures haven't "evolved" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by unrtst ( 777550 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @08:16PM (#48975043)

      sometimes there is no force nor need for evolution.

      .. and from TFS:

      ...made further adaptations unnecessary.

      It really bugs me when I see the theory of evolution referred to this way. There is no "need" or "desire" or "necessary" involved. Similarly, "survival of the fittest" has nothing to do with who is in the (subjectively) best shape or who is the smartest (though there may be correlations). Fish did not decide that they'd like to walk on land or breath air (if they did, it had nothing to do with that happening).

      If these things haven't evolved in 2 billion years, it simply means that any mutations that may have occurred resulted in lines that did not reproduce as effectively. That's still a very impressive feat, but it's not because it didn't "need" to, it's because when it did change it didn't do as well. In this case, it's very likely that this is at least partially due to the simplistic nature of this bacteria (fewer dip switches in its DNA, so to speak) and, of course, as the article points out, the very consistent environment (allowing for an optimized implementation to consistently out perform any random brethren).

      • I have always interpreted the "need" or "necessary" as the requisites that have to be fulfilled in order to find a certain organism in a certain place today (or whatever time they are talking about). So yes, the organism or the species don't "need" adaptations, they just survive or not, but you "need" the adaptations in order to explain how they can survive there. This kind of place "need" very few explanations because there is not real change and any organism that could survive at the beginning could just

      • Disagree. Why did some fish go on land, others not? I think there is some element of will, choice, involved. Some animals are naturally curious and want to explore, and with epigenetics can push their own evolution in ways they choose. We can do it; eyeglass technology means we don't have to be subject to evolutionary pressures relating to eyesight. We can choose which direction we want to go in. I think animals are similar. There is much more going on than naive realism thinks.

        • Re:Plenty of other creatures haven't "evolved" (Score:4, Insightful)

          by lgw ( 121541 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @10:10PM (#48975673) Journal

          Lamarck called; he wants his discredited theory back.

          • Lamarck called; he wants his discredited theory back.

            Lamark's theory is perfectly fine. It's not a good explanation for natural biological evolution, but it is a fair explanation for the evolution that takes place in the cultures of social animals, including humans.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by itzly ( 3699663 )

          Most likely, in some area, fish got regularly stuck in mud pools, and the adaptations helped them survive longer until the next rain. Breathing air and the ability to get around a bit would be advantages.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gsslay ( 807818 )

          Are you seriously suggesting that a fish understood the concept of "breathing air", decided it would be useful, and set itself the target of developing lungs?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by unrtst ( 777550 )

          Disagree. Why did some fish go on land, others not? I think there is some element of will, choice, involved.

          Fine. Not that I agree, but fine, think what you will.

          Now, is that part of Darwin's theory of evolution? No, and that's the part I'm complaining about.

          * people say "survival of the fittest" and use that as justification for being smart, or working out more, or war, etc etc. It's not directly related to any of those things.

          * people say didn't "need" to change, but "need" has nothing to do with it.

          These confuse the situation and make all involved a little bit more dumb because it destroys our ability to commu

      • fewer dip switches in its DNA, so to speak

        The number of "dip switches" an organism has does not correlate well with the complexity of it's body or behaviour, for example humans have about 35k genes, amoeba have half a million or more. Mathematically evolution is an exercise in hill climbing [wikipedia.org], the environment the sulphur bug lives in is the same "hill" as it was 2B years ago. Once the bug has evolved to the top of it's local hill it will stay there until the environment changes, since by definition evolving downhill would imply "survival of the weake

      • Anthropomorphising evolution doesn't bother me, it's very descriptive and very clear to people who already understand evolution. What does bother me is when creationists use it in a strawman argument such as the one you described in your post. It's not just evolution, people use this kind of language as a kind of shorthand for discussing concepts they already understand, for example, every software house I worked for in the last couple of decades had people constantly talking about what the code "thinks",

        • every software house I worked for in the last couple of decades had people constantly talking about what the code "thinks", "wants", etc.

          A recent article I listend to o nAI development suggested that it was better to name your routines like "B217" instead of "Understand_Question", precisely to dodge anthropomorphic thinking like this.

      • If these things haven't evolved in 2 billion years, it simply means that any mutations that may have occurred resulted in lines that did not reproduce as effectively.

        The reproductive efficiency can change appreciably. what doesn't seem to have changed is the gross morphology of the organism.

    • But they did go Blind in Texas.

    • The journalists reporting on this article don't know the first thing about evolution. First of all, much evolution can happen without a creature's shape changing. Which is especially true when the creature's shape is incredibly, mindnumbingly simple. Secondly, it falsely states that evolution doesn't happen in a stable environment. No, in a stable environment there would simply be less environmental natural selection. This means less selection for things such as changing the thickness of the fur coat to ada

    • I'm pretty dubious about this - and your assertion down-thread that the "American alligator" hasn't evolved for 150 million years" is frankly incredible.

      I don't know where you're getting your palaeontology from, but you need better sources.

      I'm not terribly up to scratch on the palaeontology of wasps, though I do recall that one of the large insect-rich deposits of amber is from Dominica and is about 35 million years old, so I'm going to hypothesise that you've got the far end of a "Chinese Whisper [wikipedia.org]" which

      • You're confused, you were looking at a different species. The American Alligator species is indeed 150 million years old, look it up

        • If I had time, I might look it up by checking for reports of fossils. But what would I know - I'm just a working geologist who deals with this stuff every day of the week. I'm sure you claimed experience in coding Ruby is far more relevant. How much variation in tooth profile and spacing do you see in the fossils you have access to?
        • OK, so I took the time to look it up.

          The oldest references that I can find to the age of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) is the Florida Museum of Natural History, who are of the opinion that the morpological differences between Alligator olseni (White, 1942) and Alligator mississippiensis (Daudan, 1802) are insufficient to justify calling them separate species. By the rules of zoological nomenclature the senior synomym applies. Specimens ascribed to olseni (and therefore, if you accept

  • When you're perfectly adapted any change is deleterious and will be selected against.

    • Re:Why Evolve? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rob Y. ( 110975 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:25PM (#48974681)

      If they reproduce asexually, then evolution has to count only on random mutations and copying errors. Sexual reproduction intentionally mixes up the genes so you get new combinations all the time. Evolution based on random mutations that still produce a viable organism is closer to monkeys at typewriters.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Yeah, it's a sulfur bacterium, they reproduce asexually. They live a pretty low-energy lifestyle, pretty much any deviation from the minimalist list of activities of which they're capable will be selected against.

      • The only thing that never evolves is the republican party right wing.

        • Meanwhile, Democrats claim to be evolutionists when that's what it takes to win those fish-in-a-rain-barrel arguments with creationists. Their lip service to Darwin, however, doesn't extend to economics, where they remain proud supporters of social Lysenkoism.

      • Many bacteria - I don't know if this particular group - can engage in varying degrees of horizontal gene transfer by conjugation or a number of other processes. Most bacterial reproduction is asexual, but it's not the only trick in their repertoire.
  • "Changes?! We don't need no stinkin' changes!"

  • Yay for bad summary (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    No, not everything evolves.
    Things only evolve if there's an environmental pressure that causes it. Otherwise, there's just as much of a likelyhood that they'll stay exactly the same. If an organism is successful and suited well enough to it's environment that it out-competes any altered versions of itself, then it won't change.

  • uhhh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bob.lansdorp ( 2954263 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:08PM (#48974539)
    Just because a fossil looks similar does not mean it hasn't evolved. Most evolution happens on the molecular scale, if you looked at the genomes I guarantee they would be different.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by JumperCable ( 673155 )

      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

      • Raman spectrscopy can detect gross differences in composition and structure - lipids versus cellulose, for example, but in such old rocks it's not going to be a high precision tool. It's about the best tool we've got for such old fossils though.

    • Re:uhhh (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Phronesis ( 175966 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @12:43AM (#48976639)

      Just because a fossil looks similar does not mean it hasn't evolved. Most evolution happens on the molecular scale, if you looked at the genomes I guarantee they would be different.

      The paper in PNAS discusses this at length. It clearly states that it would be very nice to be able to check DNA, but that defining species in microbes is about phenotypes, not genotypes, and the important thing is that there is no sign of speciation (that is, two separate populations, separated in space, did not diverge.

      The morphology-based “concept of hypobradytely does not necessarily imply genomic, biochemical, or physiological identity between modern and fossil taxa," a claim of extreme evolutionary stasis—a lack of speciation over billions of years—would be strengthened not only by discovery of additional fossil communities but by firm evidence of their molecular biology. Although speciation-based evolution occurs at the phenotypic rather than genotypic level of biologicenvironmental interaction, the biomolecules underlying such change are not preserved in the rock record in which such assessment can be based only on indirect proxies and inferences of physiology based on isotopic analyses

      However, the article noted, it's possible that this interpretation is wrong and that what they saw was two separate populations that underwent convergent evolution rather than one population that was separated and remained static or that there might have been significant biochemical evolution that did not change the morphology.

      Moreover, large-diameter (“giant”) sulfur bacteria of differing phylogenetic lineages can exhibit similar morphologies and patterns of behavior suggesting convergent evolution of morphologic “look-alikes” adapted to a same or similar function. Although it remains to be established whether such morphological “mimicry” is exhibited also by the more narrow 10-m-diameter sulfur bacteria described here—the two modern sulfur bacterial taxa of similar dimensions being aerobes rather than anaerobes like the Duck Creek and Turee Creek fossils—it remains conceivable that the marked similarities between the two mid-Precambrian communities and their modern counterparts could be an example of the so-called Volkswagen Syndrome, a lack of change in organismal form that masks the evolution of internal biochemical machinery

      • I don't have access to the full paper, but this doesn't surprise me.

        The morphology-based âoeconcept of hypobradytely does not necessarily imply genomic, biochemical, or physiological identity between modern and fossil taxa," a claim of extreme evolutionary stasisâ"a lack of speciation over billions of yearsâ"would be strengthened not only by discovery of additional fossil communities but by firm evidence of their molecular biology

        Schopf may have had his boldest claimed discovery challenged (s

    • they found that the bacteria look the same as bacteria of the same region from 2.3 billion years ago

      I was making exactly this point - the difference between true biological species and the palaeontologist's approximation of a "morphological species" - earlier today on a Coursera dinosaur palaeontology course.

      On the other hand, in most palaeontological circumstances, morphology is all we've got to go on.

  • Visual only (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:12PM (#48974565) Journal

    They seem to be going by visual appearance. There may be loads of DNA changes that affect metabolism chemistry and behavior that wouldn't be detectable by visual inspection of fossils. Looks can be deceiving.

    Also in the TFA: "If they were in an environment that did not change but they nevertheless evolved, that would have shown that our understanding of Darwinian evolution was seriously flawed."

    It's possible for a chance mutation or set of mutations to "discover" a new feature even in a stable environment. There are probably always better designs in highly remote combinations of mutations.

    • Thank you. haz my upvotes. With this ... even in a unchanging low radiation envioment ... some random traits still might be usefull.

  • There are no activist judges in the ocean!

  • Every species evolves every time it reproduces.

  • If it ain't broke don't fix it (Score:3)

    by TrollstonButterbeans ( 2914995 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:19PM (#48974631)
    Is part of evolution
  • To summarize: Fossils that look similar "haven't evolved". That is quite possibly the stupidest thing that I read today.

  • bacteria ... too small to see with the unaided eye (Score:4, Funny)

    by Nutria ( 679911 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2015 @07:45PM (#48974823)

    Has our educational system sunk so low that it must be mentions that you need a microscope to see bacteria?

  • How can the prove that the sulfur bacteria has not evolved? Note: They could prove that the sulfur bacteria still exists like it did long ago. But, I see no way they can prove there was NOT failed evolution paths taken in the past. And, I am NOT sure that there has NOT been evolution paths taken in the past that has resulted in bacteria so different that it might not be currently believed they evolved from this sulfur bacteria. Tim S.

  • I would have looked in a Senate subcommittee.

  • Copy of my post to the /. "Scientist Says Potential Signs of Ancient Life in Mars Rover Photos" http://science.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]

    From a link on microbial lifeforms found on Earth http://www.astrobio.net/news-e... [astrobio.net] "What’s more, MISS have remained unchanged over the last 3 billion years" MISS: microbially-induced sedimentary structure.

    "3 billion years and little if any mutations in a microbe life or it's off spring.
    “But it also raised the question: why are they so identical?” she adds. “And what does that mean about the organisms that created them?”"

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