All Life on Earth Today Descended from a Single Cell. Meet LUCA

55 pointsposted 2 days ago
by EA-3167
(quantamagazine.org)

17 Comments

Veliladon

2 days ago

Do they live on the second floor?

user

a day ago

[deleted]

yungporko

2 days ago

yes, i think i've seen him before

user

19 hours ago

[deleted]

biomcgary

a day ago

So many assumptions are necessary for this type of research, particularly for the timing. Inferring such an early age depends on a "clock" that varies based on the stringency of purifying selection. I.e., it is only clock-like to the degree that competition and the level of biological systems integration were essentially static through time.

Woodi

21 hours ago

LUCA have 2600 genes ? How such thing can be even remotely called "first" ??

fbarred

19 hours ago

From the article:

“It’s not the first cell, it’s not the first microbe, it’s not the first anything, really,” said Greg Fournier, an evolutionary biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Woodi

17 hours ago

Article also says:

"LUCA is the furthest point in evolutionary history that we can glimpse by working backward from what’s alive today."

Which translates to: first in time, IMO

But my point was: LUCA described here is realy complicated so why it makes some new quality ? Maybe some milestone, yes.

zktruth

21 hours ago

Did you skip breakfast or something? Where did you get "first" from "last"?

andrewstuart

a day ago

So weird to think we share a ancestor with mushrooms, trees and jellyfish.

lancesells

a day ago

I was thinking about this the other day. Like how all of these different types of things splintered off and evolved in different ways. Trees are these creatures that grow their limbs into the earth and the sky rendering them immobile but they have the same ancestor as us.

tonyedgecombe

a day ago

There is some speculation that the last common ancestor between us and fruit flies preceded the evolution of brains. If correct this means brains have evolved independently at least twice.

Ekaros

21 hours ago

On other had think of DNA and start wondering would same mechanism appear multiple times independently.

sixothree

a day ago

Multiple genesis events seems even weirder to me.

RobinHirst11

2 days ago

what a hard article to read.. not the biggest fan of TNR

hulitu

2 days ago

> All Life on Earth Today Descended from a Single Cell. Meet LUCA

I thought it was Adam. /d