Origin of Life: LUCA (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, March 12, 2014, 01:12 (3698 days ago) @ dhw

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> David:Which raises the obvious issue: how does one get from inorganic matter and some amino acids to the complexity of LUCA?
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> dhw:Sorry, but this doesn't make sense to me. They want to trace evolution from the origin of life to what they call LUCA. Darwin described some "primordial form into which life was first breathed". If we descended from bacteria, and bacteria descended from whatever constituted "the origin of life", that primordial form of life ... not bacteria ... has to be LUCA. (Primordial need not mean simple. It merely denotes the earliest, original form.) So Darwin got it right. As for unprecedented accuracy and detail, how can this be possible if nobody knows the origin of life?-You have not caught on to my meaning of what the science genetic folks are doing. They are working backward to a complex form of life which is represented by what we see now. It looks alot like our current bacteria.There is an obviously huge gap from Darwin's primordial ooze creature, or whatever, to LUCA, which is all we can currently define. The gap origin of life to LUCA is what the abiogenesis scientists are trying to explore, recognizing that the jump os so enormous to me, at least, it looks miraculous. Recognize that LUCA is an ancient creature, but not as ancient as the first intimations of life in something totally unknown to us.