Life is tough; living with arsenic. The bush of life (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, December 04, 2010, 13:01 (5103 days ago) @ David Turell

David has drawn our attention to a bacterium that can use arsenic instead of phosphorus.-Apologies for not commenting earlier, but there are so many threads going at the moment that it's very difficult to keep up. This particular discovery raises exactly the same questions as a bug which I think was discovered last year, but I can't find the reference. It too lived in "impossible" conditions (was it found in a volcano?) and the experts said that it could survive space travel, which gave rise to exactly the same speculations.-I remember making the comment then that if these superbugs could survive any conditions, and the driving force behind evolution was survival, what need was there for evolution? -You say: "Evolution naturally results in branching as different adaptations are tried out against natural selection" and we should view it as a bush and not a tree. There is no disagreement between us over the shape. The disagreement is over the heavenly planning department.