I went to a site that said the oldest living organism is a bacterium that was re-animated. Another site says it's a forest from one of those trees that clones itself to reproduce and the whole forest was one organism. How can they say either of those is "the oldest living organism" if the bacterium wasn't actually "living" until it was animated again, and cloning makes separate organisms?

Gnomon

Cloning in plants makes two organisms out of one, but each one is the same organism as the original. Imagine if you could split yourself down the middle so that you were two halves each with one arm and one leg. Then the two halves could grow the bits they were missing. Would one of these halves be the parent and the other the child? No, they would both have a serious claim to being the original person. This is what that bush in the Mojave desert does. So what appears to be a load of separate plants is actually one plant. Its age is judged from the time it grew from a seed, which was about 15,000 years ago. When talking about bacteria, the concept of 'age' does not really apply. Think about this: if you have a document in your word processor and you delete one of the letter e's from it, then type in a new one, is it the same e, or a different one? Does that make any sense? In a bacterium, all the bits of the bacterium have been replaced many times and it has reproduced millions of times, but it is still the same bacterium, so each bacterium in the world today could be said to be thousands of millions of years old. It's just a matter of how you define things. There is no clear-cut answer. Oct 04 02, 7:01 AM