2-billion-year-old bacteria that hasn’t evolved is more evidence for evolution: scientists

2-billion-year-old bacteria that hasn’t evolved is more evidence for evolution: scientists

Because Darwin's theory holds that animals adapt to a constantly changing environment, an environment that is unchanged should result in a creature that had no need to adjust -- which is exactly what a team of scientists found.

An international team of scientists has identified a microorganism that has been around for 2 billion years and hasn’t evolved — which actually provides more evidence for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Lead researcher J. William Schopf, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, said that in evolution, organisms adapt to a changing environment, but if there aren’t any changes to the environment, an organism would have no need to evolve. This microorganism proves that to be the case, he said, according to an ABC News report.

In fact, Schopf has been searching since his freshman year of college — five decades ago — for durable environment that didn’t change and could thus demonstrate that without change, there is no evolution. He finally found this environment when scientists found living specimens of a bacteria that eats sulfur off the coast of Western Australia way beneath the muddy sediment on the ocean floor. They are so far below the surface that oxygen and light can’t reach them, nor can they feel the ripple of waves or the movement of sea creatures.

They were able to compare the microbes with fossils that had been preserved in rocks in Western Australia’s coastal waters that are 2.3 billion years old, which would have been at a time when oxygen levels would have risen dramatically. These higher oxygen levels caused an increase in sulfate and nitrate compounds that sunk to the bottom of the ocean, providing food for these microbes.

Fossils that are 1.8 billion years old also look exactly the same as the 2.3 billion-year-old fossil and the microbes found living today.

Because Darwin’s theory centered around how animals evolve in response to an environment that never stops changing, this find fits in with the theory of evolution, as it demonstrates that creatures that don’t have to make adjustments simply don’t, and can stay unchanged for billions of years in the right environment.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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