LUCA latest (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 27, 2016, 15:54 (3039 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: In this context, I was struck by the following quote:
"He argues that Luca is very close to the origin of life itself. The organism is missing so many genes necessary for life that it must still have been relying on chemical components from its environment."
I don't know about you, but I find it pretty hard to imagine our poor old LUCA sweltering in his deep sea vent, lacking all those genes, and yet at the same time possessing all the information needed to become an Eskimo living in Alaska.-DAVID: Please remember LUCA is a theorized close-to-the-origin animal, based on genome studies and assumptions, not a real discovery. It makes the assumption that evolution went from a few genes to many which is most likely true […]
Finally, remember that these genes must contain information on how to evolve. All the probably correct genes may not have been chosen.-Thank you for the reminders. Information on how to evolve is another term for what I call the autonomous inventive mechanism, which would have had to be there from the beginning or there would have been no evolution. But equally evolution could not have taken place without masses and masses of new information for the mechanism to work with. Otherwise, if this LUCA theory is correct, life would have been confined to deep sea vents.