Sulfur Bacteria, Uncharged for Billions of Years, Confirm Darwinian Evolution. Come Again?

David Klinghoffer February 4, 2015 3:02 AM | Permalink

An organism's staying exactly the same for 2 billion years -- in other words, not evolving a bit -- supports the Darwinian theory of evolution, say scientists who studied fossils in rocks from the waters off the West Australian coast and uncovered the "greatest absence of evolution ever reported."

Nope, not The Onion. We read at Science Daily:

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 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.
"It seems astounding that life has not evolved for more than 2 billion years -- nearly half the history of Earth," said J. William Schopf, a UCLA professor of earth, planetary and space sciences in the UCLA College who was the study's lead author. "Given that evolution is a fact, this lack of evolution needs to be explained."

Given that Darwinian theory is a "fact," it must be shown that it is a "fact" regardless of evidence to the contrary. Well, given the premise, that would have to be so. The solution, please?

"The rule of biology is not to evolve unless the physical or biological environment changes, which is consistent with Darwin," said Schopf, who also is director of UCLA's Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life. The environment in which these microorganisms live has remained essentially unchanged for 3 billion years, he said.
"These microorganisms are well-adapted to their simple, very stable physical and biological environment," he said. "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."

That was deft. It's not what they expected. But then again, it's exactly what they expected.

In summary, Darwinism is demonstrated when life evolves. It's also demonstrated when it does not. If the bacteria had changed, what would they have said? Since Darwinian evolution is a fact, you can be certain that too would be reconciled with the theory, like all evidence, one way or the other, come hell or high water.

… neither can Darwinism explain how things come to be for instead of an intelligent designer (which intuitively makes sense) it offers random mistakes filtered by natural selection which is just another layer of randomness (which makes no sense at all). The details of why random mistakes would show up in a useful progression such that tremendously complicated structures get built up are never provided, nor explained, nor quantified in any way that science demands. Nor is it at all clear how each mistake could provide instant benefits even though a fully functional transformation remains in the distant future.
…But wait— it gets worse. Darwinism (unlike ID) doesn’t even exclude anything. It allows for convergent evolution (statistically impossible), stagnant evolution (you mean to tell me that for 500 million years there could be no improvement to the horseshoe crab?), punctuated evolution (everything stays the same for a real long time and then evolution kicks into high gear and it all happens so fast there’s no record of it having happened at all), neutral evolution (the blueprints for marvelously useful structures get created in unexpressed DNA by random shuffling, until one day voila, the gene is turned on and the structure appears fully formed). In evolution anything goes and contradictions live in happy harmony with one another. This is science? It’s not even a sound religion.
- Laszlo Bencze

******* *******

“Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion–a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint … the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”
– Michael Ruse, How evolution became a religion

Evolution is like globull warming. EVERYTHING “supports” their theory.

Precisely. So much of what is called science is pure conjecture.

The measured, repeated reaction of a substance to the introduction of another substance is science. Understanding the electromagnetic spectrum with methodical testing is science. Casting guesses about why a Star Fish doesn't have toes is not science.

Science was a field of true discovery starting in the late 17th century, with discoveries building on each other exponentially through the mid to late 20th century.

Although there are still a few true scientific revelations, most scientific fields are at a dead end, or at best in the utilitarian application stage, compared to the glory days of world changing discoveries. In 1900, a PhD could have spent days listing major phenomenon that were a mystery. Now it is a handful of subjects that are generally unprovable in a truly definitive way.

Science is stale, but there are more scientists than ever. So what do they do? They mainly compete to come up with the most plausibly acceptable guesses. They can't be proved wrong, and any peer that dares point it out is kicking at the entire house of cards.

No Christian denies micro-evolution, that there are changes within species. There are dog breeds from Chihuahua to Great Dane, but they’re still dogs. It’s the macro-evolution thing, that dinos morphed into chickens, etc., that has no observable, repeatable scientific basis, no transitional forms, etc. There should be billions upon billions of such transitional forms for goo to you through the zoo to be true, but there’s not a single one that hasn’t been disputed.

In fact, a t-rex bone was recently found out west that was NOT permineralized (fossilized) and still had wet gelatinous heme in its marrow. After 65 million years. Riiiight.

Origins “science” is in reality a misnomer. Evolution purports to be “science,” but in reality is merely faith. Just like Christianity. They try to dress it up in scientific language, but it’s still just faith, as Ruse admitted.

The most “simple” of single-celled organisms is stupendously complex. It’s laughable to believe that complexity could’ve sprung from random processes. The formation of even a single protein via random processes has been likened to a solar system full of blind men all simultaneously solving the Rubik’s Cube. And that “simple” organism requires dozens of proteins, organelles, cytoplasm, a selectively permeable cell membrane and the most complex code in the world: DNA. Such faith!

Non-Evolving Sulfur Bacteria Are on a March Through the Headlines

David Klinghoffer February 4, 2015 12:08 PM | Permalink

I can't decide whether my favorite organism in the news today is King Abdullah, for his righteous wrath and quoting of Clint Eastwood -- or those Australian sulfur bacteria that have stayed stubbornly, exactly the same for two billion plus years, defying what would seem to be evolutionary expectations.

I referred to the latter earlier. They are trending in evolution news currently and generating some priceless headlines. The Los Angeles Times chirps, "By not evolving, deep sea microbes may prove Darwin right":

Researchers say these microscopic organisms are an example of "extreme evolutionary stasis" and represent the greatest lack of evolution ever seen.
They may also, paradoxically, prove that Darwin's theory of evolution is true.
"If evolution is a product of changes in the physical and biological environment, and there are no changes in the physical and biological environment, then there will be no evolution," said J. William Schopf, a paleobiologist at UCLA.
He calls it the null hypothesis required of Darwin's equation.

The Washington Post agrees, touting "The mysterious 2 billion-year-old creature that would make Darwin smile." He would smile!

In what researchers call the "greatest absence of evolution ever reported," these deep-sea creatures have taken a pass on the chaos of biological progress for the past 2.3 billion years. Leave it to other organisms to battle with the forces of natural selection -- to mutate and change, to prove their fitness in order to survive. The dinosaurs tried it, and where are they now?
A study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences said these communities offer evidence of "extreme evolutionary stasis" -- a total lack of evolution in response to a lack of change in the surrounding environment. Populated by sulfur-cycling bacteria that derive energy from processing dissolved sulfate in the surrounding water, the communities were found in nearly identical forms at two distinct points in the fossil record and still exist today.

Live Science is more leery, "2 Billion Years Unchanged, Bacteria Pose an Evolutionary Puzzle."

Meanwhile at Why Evolution Is True, Jerry Coyne denies that there are sufficient grounds to conclude that the bacteria remain unchanged ("A new paper claims that evolution has stopped in a bacterial species. Is it true?"):

The lesson is that it's dangerous to use fossils -- even bacterial fossils -- to conclude that evolution hasn't occurred. And the "null hypothesis of Darwinism" is a bit dubious anyway. Yes, species probably change most rapidly when the environment is changing, but there's no reason why environmental change is a sine qua non for evolution.
The paper by Schopf et al. does show an intriguing case of morphological and metabolic stasis over billions of years, and it probably does reflect a lack of environmental change. But what it doesn't show is that evolution hasn't occurred in these bacteria. To know that, we'd have to have them all alive to sequence their DNA and look at their physiology, reproduction, and so on --and that's impossible for the fossil species.

So running through the options, it either is a puzzle for evolutionary theory when things fail to evolve over billions of years; or it isn't a puzzle -- in fact it confirms the theory; or we can't really know whether it's a puzzle or not. It either "seems astounding" in an evolutionary perspective (the words of UCLA's Dr. Schopf ), or it "fits perfectly with [Darwin's] ideas" (again, Dr. Schopf). Darwin would smile, or he would grimace, or perhaps neither.

Here's the question. For those claiming non-evolution as a victory for Darwinism, would they be saying it was a black eye if the bacteria had, in fact, changed a little or a lot over all that time? Of course not. Darwinian theory is confirmed, it all "fits perfectly," no matter what evidence turns up.

Like every lefty they just can’t hit the “I believe” button and move on to more important things. And the reality is that they are miserable people who wish to drag everyone down into their swamp. They have to be a killjoy to everyone who aren’t as miserable as they are.

As a Physicist the more I learned at the quantum level, the more I knew that I could not know everything. There were so many areas of specialty in post-doc to degrees that I never imagined before then.

What one notices within the post graduate hard sciences is that there are the 15% who are avowed atheists, 15% who are like me, quasi-neutral but accepting of the possibilities beyond what our simple minds can fathom, and the 70% who are devout Christian/Jews. Not your run of the mill believers but every Saturday/Sunday active synagog/church goers.

When questioned by me about this as a newly minted Ph.D the physics department chair said “I can’t explain everything, I can’t know everything, and in the absence of this ability I have to believe in something larger than myself else I’ll go crazy trying. You have to have some level of peace of mind and acceptance of your place in the cosmos”.

He further explained that as you become more aware of what you don’t know, and that you simply cannot know because you don’t have enough time on earth to learn it, the smaller you begin to feel, into a level of insignificance that is dangerous to your overall mental health. Thus the need to believe in something larger/greater than yourself.

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