Well, this isn’t your old Darwin teacher’s evolution either, is it?:
Understanding how bacteria interact is critical to solving growing problems such as antibiotic resistance, in which infectious bacteria form defenses to thwart the medicines used to fight them.
Now, researchers at the University of Delaware have discovered that bacteria do more than just work together. Bacterial cells from different species can combine into unique hybrid cells by fusing their cell walls and membranes and sharing cellular contents, including proteins and ribonucleic acid (RNA), the molecules which regulate gene expression and control cell metabolism. In other words, the organisms exchange material and lose part of their own identity in the process…
“They mix their machinery to survive or do metabolism, and that’s kind of extraordinary, because we always assumed that each and every organism has its own independent identity and machinery,” said Papoutsakis.
Julie Stewart, “ When two bacteria become one” at UDaily
Paper. (open access)
See also: Paper: Paradigm shift needed in understanding evolution of complex animals Paper: “Horizontal gene transfer and mating between diverged lineages blur species boundaries and challenge the reconstruction of evolutionary histories of species and their genomes.” A friend writes to ask, “If we don’t have common descent, and we don’t have natural selection, why do we still call it evolution?”
Well, it’s not all that extraordinary. Many parasites, both insect and fungus, become “organs” inside other animals, participating in the metabolism and commanding the animal to do horrible things. At least one male fish obeys the New Testament definition of marriage, merging his flesh with the female’s flesh.
Once again, there is something witnessed that does not fit with speciation, but adaptation. Why would any organism exchange material at the cost of identity? Darwinists tell us that there is a selfish gene to prohibit such a loss, yet it happens.
As to:
The assumption that ‘every organism has its own independent identity’, and belongs to a specific species, is not an assumption that arises from Darwinian evolution.
Darwinists, within their reductive materialistic framework, simply have no way to rigidly classify exactly what a species is.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Last year a Darwinist admitted that “The most important concept in all of biology, (i.e. species), is a complete mystery”
In fact, Charles Darwin himself admitted that he did not have a rigid definition for what the term ‘species’ actually meant when he stated that, “I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given, for the sake of convenience.,,,”
As should be needless to say, the inability for a supposedly scientific theory, a supposedly scientific theory that seeks to explain the “Origin of Species” in the first place, to clearly define what a species actually is is a clear indication that that supposedly scientific theory cannot possibly be the proper ‘scientific’ explanation for the “Origin of Species” in the first place!
The reason why Darwinists can never provide a rigid definition for what a species actually is is because, for the Darwinian materialist, “there is no immaterial, immutable form” only “changing shapes, which happen to resemble each other today but will not tomorrow.”
More specifically, the term ‘species’ is an abstract concept and/or definition of the immaterial mind that is not reducible to any possible materialistic explanation.. i.e. How much does the concept of species weigh? Does the concept ‘species’ weigh more in English or in Chinese? How long is the concept of species in millimeters? How fast does the concept go? Is the concept of species faster or slower than the speed of light? Is the concept of species positively or negatively charged? Or etc.. etc.. ?..
There simply is no way to reduce the abstract immaterial concept of species to materialistic explanations.
As such, any purported ‘scientific’ theory that seeks to explain the ‘Origin of Species’ within the framework of reductive materialism, as Darwinian evolution seeks to do, will forever by stymied in its efforts. As the old joke goes, ‘You can’t get there from here’
I believe this is the paper.