‘Shocking!’ They are not evolving! according to reports in Bigelow News and ScienceDaily 8 April 2021, Science Alert 9 April 2021, and The ISME Journal, 6 April 2021; doi: 10.1038/s41396-021-00965-3.
Originally found deep in a South African mine, a bacterium named Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator was found to survive on a diet of chemicals produced from radioactivity deep in the earth. Since then the bacteria have also been found deep underground in California and Siberia where the chemical environments are each very different. Scientists thought they had “a unique opportunity to look for differences that have emerged between the populations over their millions of years of evolution”. However, when scientists from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences studied 126 samples from the three different and widely separated sites, they found the separate genomes were almost identical.
According to Ramunas Stepanauskas, who led the study, “It was shocking. They had the same makeup, and so we started scratching our heads”. Stepanauskas went on to explain: “The best explanation we have at the moment is that these microbes did not change much since their physical locations separated during the breakup of supercontinent Pangaea, about 175 million years ago. They appear to be living fossils from those days”. The scientists suggest the microbes have remained unchanged because of accurate copying of their DNA which has maintained them in a state of “evolutionary stasis”.
These unusual microbes were originally discovered in 2005 and later studied by an international team of scientists, including scientists from NASA Astrobiology Institute. A NASA news article made the following comments about the microbes: “Genomic analyses have revealed that the organism’s genes code for everything needed to sustain an independent existence and reproduce, including the ability to fix its own nitrogen, move freely, sense its environment, protect itself from viruses, and even sporulate during nutrient-poor periods”. (NASA News 10 October 2008) Sporulate means to form spores.
Links: Bigelow, NASA, Science Alert, ScienceDaily
Editorial Comment: Unlike the research team above, we are neither shocked nor scratching our heads. This new study combined with the results of the 2008 study is evidence that since its first recorded appearance on planet earth this microbe has existed in a fully functional state which has provably not changed from then till now – exactly like all living fossils.
Secondly, despite their evolutionist prejudice, even the NASA article admits the bacterium is well designed to live where it was found. Ipso Facto, this is exactly what you’d expect to result from Genesis 1-2 being true. They were created to work well and to reproduce copies of themselves without evolving. On that basis we predict that if their fossils are found in claimed older rocks they will still be the same unevolved and unevolving bugs.
P.S. 1 Note that the researchers who did this present study used the term “living fossil” but they did not find any fossilised bacteria.
P.S. 2 Don’t miss the fact that the term “evolutionary stasis” is evolutionist code for saying a living organism has not evolved.
Creation Research News 14 April 2021
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