2.3 Billion Year Old Fossil

Guest: Malcolm Walter, Professor of Astrobiology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney  Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection says that organisms evolve in response to changes in their environment. So the flip side of Darwin’s theory is that if there’s no change in an environment, organisms won’t change either. Evidence of an organism that has remained completely unchanged for millions of years fully supports Darwin’s theory of evolution. Fossils dating from 1.8 to 2.8 billion years old remain untouched on the ocean’s floor.   “On the sea floor there’s mud, very soft mud,” says Walter, “and there’s microbes living in that mud.”  Walter says oxygen is what drives evolution. “In ancient times, the whole of the earth had very little oxygen in waters of the ocean and the atmosphere.”