The Credulous Evolutionist

With Darwin Frenzy Day nearly over it is time to introduce a new feature to the blog: The Credulous Evolutionist. Today's entry is the assertion that primordial bacteria had only soft membranes instead of the hard shells of today's bacteria.

This is deduced from the behavior of "L-form" bacteria, a modified bacteria which were produced by researchers at Newcastle University and their story published in Nature. L-form bacteria do not have the hard shell, but are encased in a soft, flexible "wobbly" membrane. When bacteria are in this modified form, they do not replicate by splitting as do the hard shell originals. Instead, the L-form pulsates, then "squirts out babies", as many as five at a time.

Good so far? Here's where it goes awry. The researchers concluded that

“What we have uncovered seems to be a primitive mode of growth probably used by the very earliest cells on the planet,” says Professor Errington, Director of the Institute for Cell and Molecular Biosciences at Newcastle University.

“All modern bacteria are used to living inside their wall which is a great sheltered place to be but it’s an engineering feat to be able to expand it, keeping it intact at all times and then pinch it off into two. We now think that before the wall was invented, very early in evolution, cells used this squirting method to increase in number.” [Emphasis added]

So, from a structure that is not known to exist in nature - the soft shelled bacterium - it was decided that the original bacteria were indeed soft shelled; limited their reproduction to the more difficult splitting of the hard shell; limited the numbers of each reproductive cycle; completely changed the manner in which they replicate from ejecting complete babies to splitting in two.

The evidence for this is... Well, there is exactly no evidence: it is purely conjecture. But they got it published in Nature.

The article in physorg.com had just one comment, by someone called "superhuman":

"This division is almost certainly an artifact due to lack of cell wall, cell wall is an essential element of bacteria physiology and plays crucial role in cell division, it's to be expected that bacteria are not dividing in the usual way without it.

There is absolutely no reason to think it has anything to do with how bacterial ancestors divided.

Exactly so. The urge to create an evolution story for every biological phenomenon seems to be overpowering for some researchers, who seem to believe their own concoctions. Or at least they would like us to.

I see this feature as ongoing, with so many of these out-of-bounds evolutionary stories to choose from. It should be both interesting and fun, a good combination but not thought to be found in primordial bacteria...