Origin of Life: LUCA (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, March 13, 2014, 11:39 (3909 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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 is 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.-The jump from bacteria to us is itself so enormous that it looks miraculous. My point, however, is that if these bacteria-like creatures were descended from earlier forms of life, it is the earlier forms of life that constitute the Last Universal Common Ancestor. It is quite illogical to say that the forms of life that led to the bacteria were somehow dislocated from the chain. Darwin's unknown "primordial form" therefore has to be LUCA. And secondly, I remain baffled by the claim that "continuing advances in evolutionary biology, bioinformatics, and computational biology will give us the tools to describe LUCA and the evolutionary transitions preceding it with unprecedented accuracy and detail. " (My bold) How can there be accuracy in tracing evolution from the origin of life to bacteria if no-one knows the origin of life?