This seems to be an admission that even if every possible mutation (from the finite set of possibilities) occurs at some point in the colony, then we still have - bacteria, surely with these rates of reproduction and probabilities of mutation and so on, doesn't this show that the bacteria evolving never leads to anything other than a variant of the bacteria? That the set of all possible mutants is either dead or still more or less the same bacteria.To better understand the impact of this situation, think of it this way: With a genome size of 2.8 × 10^6 and a mutation rate of 1 mutation per 10^10 base pairs, it would take a single bacterium 30 hours to grow into a population in which every single base pair in the genome will have mutated not once, but 30 times! Thus, any individual mutation that could theoretically occur in the bacteria will have occurred somewhere in that population—in just over a day.
Given the rate at which bacteria reproduce and their number on earth and in societies, shouldn't we see evidence that the genome has developed more and more novelty? yet it seems all we see is just bacteria...
So is there evidence that bacteria can become something quite different given enough time and if not, why not? are the possible states that the genome can get into simply insufficient to ever lead to escalating novelty?