The bacterium you mentioned are not known to be able to survive without ingesting organic material. They can simply go for extended periods without, metabolizing that which they've stored...not unlike a very simplified version of a bear hibernating.
Could you please provide some sources for this claim?
These people seem to disagree:
Lichens will grow almost anywhere that a stable and reasonbly well-lit surface occurs. This may include soil, rock, or even the sides of trees. A lichen may absorb certain mineral nutrients from any of these substrates on which it grows, but is generally self-reliant in feeding itself through photosynthesis in the algal cells. Thus, lichens growing on trees are not parasites on the trees and do not feed on them, any more than you feed on the chair you sit in. Lichens growing in trees are simply using the tree as a home. Lichens growing on rocks, though, may release chemicals which speed the degradation of the rock into soil, and thus promote production of new soils.
Or check this:
...The isolate was a microaerobic-to-anaerobic chemolithoautotroph capable of using molecular hydrogen as the sole energy source and carbon dioxide as the sole carbon source...
and one more:
Nitrosomonas europaea is a bacterium that can derive all its energy and reductant for growth from the oxidation of ammonia to nitrite. The cell's demand for carbon has to be met almost entirely by the fixation of carbon dioxide. Additional mineral salts complete the cell's nutritional needs. Although this bacterium can incorporate small amounts of organic compounds into cellular biomass (19, 20, 59, 60), there is an obligate requirement for oxidation of ammonia and assimilation of inorganic nutrients to support growth. As such, this bacterium is a member of a small group of bacteria known as obligate chemolithoautotrophs.
Couldn't resist Thiobacillus ferrooxidans
"T. ferrooxidans can be grown on elemental sulfur using ferric iron as an electron acceptor." No mention of any organics needed or used.
(Google can be addictive) Streptomyces thermoautotrophicus sp. nov., a Thermophilic CO- and H2-Oxidizing Obligate Chemolithoautotroph
this guy can live on car exhaust!
"S. thermoautotrophicus could grow with CO (td = 8 h), H2 plus CO2 (td = 6 h), car exhaust, or gas produced by the incomplete combustion of wood. Complex media or heterotrophic substrates such as sugars, organic acids, amino acids, and alcohols did not support growth. Molybdenum was required for CO-autotrophic growth. For growth with H2, nickel was not necessary."
And even if this were the case, it still argues against the basic theory of evolution. Surely, if this were a possibility, it would be a trait of the most advanced life forms on the planet as it would guarantee survival in hostile conditions.
First, who's saying bacteria aren't the most advanced lfeforms? They've been here longer than anyone else, and can survive in the wierdest places.
Actually, it's more of an argument against design. Why?
It's easy to imagine designing something with all sorts of redundency and backup systems. It might, in retrospect, have been better to have symbiotc nitrogen-fixers and chemotrophs in our gut, instead of E. coli and his (ahem) buds. Or symbiotic phototrophs. However, it's not at all clear what the downside of this would be: if we had leaves, that's a lot of extra mass and surface area to carry around that's only needed when hunting and gathering are bad.
But in ToE, we're a function of what we're descended from.
Features can be lost: unlike almost all other mammals, great apes (including us) have lost the ability to make vitamin C. Evidently there was enough in some ancestor's diet that it didn't get scurvy. Not having lost this would promote survival at sea, but the designer didn't plan for this.
Nice discussion, but it's past my bedtime.
Merry Christmas!
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