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LUCA is an acronym for Last Universal Common Ancestor. I have 2 questions about this:
1) What are the applications of LUCA in evolutionary science? IOW is there a functional use? For example, is the genome of LUCA used to establish cladograms?
2) As stated here, "LUCA is not thought to be the first life on Earth, but rather the latest that is ancestral to all current existing life". Therefore, I would expect commonalities in life prior to LUCA to be closer to an assumption than a theorem. As such, I wouldn't expect functional applications of this prior life, but rather structural contributions to evolutionary theory. For example, that is the reason all life consists of the same 20 amino acids. Is there such a structural contribution and what is it?
If my examples are flawed in some way, or you don't understand the question, I would like to do our best to come to a mutual understanding.
Lastly, people always ask what motivates my questions. In this case, the question was sparked by a review of Monad to Man by Peter Bowler (American Scientist, vol.85, 1997). In that review he states, "The biomedical sciences have flourished because they are experimental and have direct practical applications. But their success is based on a profound lack of interest in the question of how organisms we study were formed. As long as we can fix the machines, we do not care how they were designed--and many rest content with the idea of a supernatural Designer. Evolution requires an interest in origins, and an acceptance of the different techniques needed to study them, which is simply not shared by many biologists."
Question #1 stems from the statement that "Evolution requires an interest in origins", and question #2 from the required "... acceptance of the different techniques needed to study them ..."
1) What are the applications of LUCA in evolutionary science? IOW is there a functional use? For example, is the genome of LUCA used to establish cladograms?
2) As stated here, "LUCA is not thought to be the first life on Earth, but rather the latest that is ancestral to all current existing life". Therefore, I would expect commonalities in life prior to LUCA to be closer to an assumption than a theorem. As such, I wouldn't expect functional applications of this prior life, but rather structural contributions to evolutionary theory. For example, that is the reason all life consists of the same 20 amino acids. Is there such a structural contribution and what is it?
If my examples are flawed in some way, or you don't understand the question, I would like to do our best to come to a mutual understanding.
Lastly, people always ask what motivates my questions. In this case, the question was sparked by a review of Monad to Man by Peter Bowler (American Scientist, vol.85, 1997). In that review he states, "The biomedical sciences have flourished because they are experimental and have direct practical applications. But their success is based on a profound lack of interest in the question of how organisms we study were formed. As long as we can fix the machines, we do not care how they were designed--and many rest content with the idea of a supernatural Designer. Evolution requires an interest in origins, and an acceptance of the different techniques needed to study them, which is simply not shared by many biologists."
Question #1 stems from the statement that "Evolution requires an interest in origins", and question #2 from the required "... acceptance of the different techniques needed to study them ..."
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