Cope's rule and bacterial evolution

There is an old idea about mammal and dinosaur evolution known as
Cope's rule or Cope's law. Wikipedia has a nice explanation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cope's_law

Whether the rule stands up to scrutiny or not, it is interesting
because of its somewhat paradoxical combination of a direction
to micro-evolution superposed on a macro-evolutionary trend in
the opposite direction. Most species get bigger over time,
but big species tend to go extinct and it is the little species
which branch prolifically producing new species. So the
number of species in each size range stays constant.

Cute idea, even if it isn't really true.

I found out about the following research on an ID website, but
it seems legit:

A. Mira, et al., "Deletional bias and the evolution of bacterial
genomes", Trends in Genetics 17 (2001), 589.

I haven't read it, but the idea seems to be a kind of Cope's rule
for bacterial evolution. But in this case, the bacteria aren't
trending larger, they are trending SIMPLER. Their genomes are
getting smaller. They are optimizing by discarding rarely needed
functionality and thereby gaining a competitive edge in a
narrowly specialized niche. But, in doing so, they risk eventual
extinction.

And of course, counter to this micro-evolutionary trend, there
is the macro-trend. It is the generalist bacteria with the
relatively large genomes which branch and produce new bacterial
species.

Extrapolating backward we can imagine that the LUCA (Last Universal
Common Ancestor) was the most versatile and generalist micro-organism
of them all, and had the biggest genome. ;-)

The idea may not be as crazy as it sounds. And, in any case,
it, too, is a cute idea.


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