All life on Earth comes from one single ancestor, now we know what it was
All life on Earth comes from one single ancestor, now we know what it was
Archived (Wayback Machine):
I really don't understand the need to pin it down as one ancestor. Horizontal gene transfer would've been incredibly common(exacerbated by the viruses and low defense against them). Trying to play like there was one organism that collected all the features ignores the features just getting wholesale transplanted later.
Continuously adding the Evolutions pile of evidence is a good thing
I just think it's a framing problem. In bacteria and archaea(particularly in the early periods) the genes themselves are what were impacted by natural selection and they would propegate between species based on the gene's fitness alone. "Ancestor" is a bit of a misnomer and it's very hard to ever say you've developed a timeline.
Because so far the evidence points to everything having come from one ancestor.