If I had time, I might look it up by checking for reports of fossils. But what would I know - I'm just a working geologist who deals with this stuff every day of the week. I'm sure you claimed experience in coding Ruby is far more relevant. How much variation in tooth profile and spacing do you see in the fossils you have access to?

The likelihood of getting a vaguely complete DNA sequence from multi-billion-year old fossils is slender. Our best example of "ancient DNA" from fossils has a less than 1% complete genome from rocks a little over 100Myr old. 2000 Myr old fossils might have a 0.0000000000000000001 % complete genome (if preserved in exceptionally well.

I don't have access to the full paper, but this doesn't surprise me.

The morphology-based âoeconcept of hypobradytely does not necessarily imply genomic, biochemical, or physiological identity between modern and fossil taxa," a claim of extreme evolutionary stasisâ"a lack of speciation over billions of yearsâ"would be strengthened not only by discovery of additional fossil communities but by firm evidence of their molecular biology

Schopf may have had his boldest claimed discovery challenged (successfully) by Brasier (recently deceased, alas ; Intended to buy the guy a whiskey if I ever met him ; fun writer), but that doesn't make Schopf a fool. Unlike some of the dimmer denizens of Slashdot, he wasn't going to make that error.

Raman spectrscopy can detect gross differences in composition and structure - lipids versus cellulose, for example, but in such old rocks it's not going to be a high precision tool. It's about the best tool we've got for such old fossils though.

Many bacteria - I don't know if this particular group - can engage in varying degrees of horizontal gene transfer by conjugation or a number of other processes. Most bacterial reproduction is asexual, but it's not the only trick in their repertoire.

every software house I worked for in the last couple of decades had people constantly talking about what the code "thinks", "wants", etc.

A recent article I listend to o nAI development suggested that it was better to name your routines like "B217" instead of "Understand_Question", precisely to dodge anthropomorphic thinking like this.

I would suggest Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" finds its way onto your bookshelf. Or video feed. While that's a superficially appealing way to envisage things, the fossil record of the evolution of land-dwelling tetrapods was considerably more complex.

Lamarck called; he wants his discredited theory back.

Lamark's theory is perfectly fine. It's not a good explanation for natural biological evolution, but it is a fair explanation for the evolution that takes place in the cultures of social animals, including humans.

If these things haven't evolved in 2 billion years, it simply means that any mutations that may have occurred resulted in lines that did not reproduce as effectively.

The reproductive efficiency can change appreciably. what doesn't seem to have changed is the gross morphology of the organism.

[..] I suspect genomic changes have still occurred. Neutral drift alone would assure that these bacteria were not identical at the molecular level to their two billion year old ancestors.

I would put good money on this being true. Not my normal "1 pint" bet, but this time a whole hangover!

Goddish idiots like you shouldn't be allowed to use modern technology. Like medicine, or electricity.

and yet it stopped evolving so long ago.

This is extremely implausible. I suspect you have been the victim of the misreporting of the actual science results. As I elaborate in my comment on your FP.

I'm pretty dubious about this - and your assertion down-thread that the "American alligator" hasn't evolved for 150 million years" is frankly incredible.

I don't know where you're getting your palaeontology from, but you need better sources.

I'm not terribly up to scratch on the palaeontology of wasps, though I do recall that one of the large insect-rich deposits of amber is from Dominica and is about 35 million years old, so I'm going to hypothesise that you've got the far end of a "Chinese Whisper" which started with "organisms which look like modern wasps were found in (Dominican amber) which is 35 million years old".

I know my reptile evolutionary history somewhat better. While there were undoubtedly suchiform ("crocodile shaped") Suchian reptiles (ancestors of crocodiles) around 150 million years ago, that does not mean that they're the same species as the modern American alligator. At the very least, there was a modest burst of suchian evolution in the period shortly after the Cretaceous-Palaeocene boundary extinctions, which would very likely have affected many aspects of the lives of all large organisms that survived the end-Cretaceous events. Shortage of large prey would have made dwarfism a common strategy for tens of millennia, followed by an opportunity for the suchians to become the dominant land animals. Which they would have been in competition with phorusrachid "terror-birds" and mammals. It's arguable if the mammals (about 6000 species) or the birds (nearly 10000 species) won that race.

A few years ago I had the pleasure (I'm a geologist - I have ... abnormal ... pleasures) of spending an afternoon going through the Natural History Museum's cabinets of fossil coelocanths from the Mesozoic, and comparing them with the 1960-odd specimen in the main hall of the museum. From personal observation I can assert that this famous "living fossil" has changed over the 90-odd million years during which we haven't had a fossil record for it. For a start, it's about 4 times the size of it's older relatives.

they found that the bacteria look the same as bacteria of the same region from 2.3 billion years ago

I was making exactly this point - the difference between true biological species and the palaeontologist's approximation of a "morphological species" - earlier today on a Coursera dinosaur palaeontology course.

On the other hand, in most palaeontological circumstances, morphology is all we've got to go on.

(1) Get vaccinated and be allowed to live in society. Or,

(2) don't get vaccinated and be thrown into a convenient pit (or offshore island) surrounded by automated shoot-to-kill machine gun robots.

Simples!