Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
Minna M. Koskela,Arto Annila +1 more
TL;DR: Genomic sequences across diverse species seem to align towards a common ancestry, eventually implying that eons ago some universal antecedent organism would have lived on the face of Earth, but when evolution is understood not only as a biological process but as a general thermodynamic process, it becomes apparent that the quest for the last universal common ancestor is unattainable.
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Abstract: Genomic sequences across diverse species seem to align towards a common ancestry, eventually implying that eons ago some universal antecedent organism would have lived on the face of Earth. However, when evolution is understood not only as a biological process but as a general thermodynamic process, it becomes apparent that the quest for the last universal common ancestor is unattainable. Ambiguities in alignments are unavoidable because the driving forces and paths of evolution cannot be separated from each other. Thus tracking down life’s origin is by its nature a non-computable task. The thermodynamic tenet clarifies that evolution is a path-dependent process of least-time consumption of free energy. The natural process is without a demarcation line between animate and inanimate.
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Citations
Primary Endosymbiosis: Emergence of the Primary Chloroplast and the Chromatophore, Two Independent Events.
TL;DR: This chapter describes the current understanding of primary endosymbiosis, with a specific focus on primary chloroplasts considered to have emerged more than one billion years ago, and on the chromatophore, having emerged about one hundred million years ago.
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How Did Thylakoids Emerge in Cyanobacteria, and How Were the Primary Chloroplast and Chromatophore Acquired?
Eric Maréchal
TL;DR: Thylakoids in cyanobacteria emerged from a lipid phase transition, coinciding with the great oxygenation event, while primary chloroplasts and chromatophores acquired through primary endosymbiosis, facilitated by horizontal gene transfers and phagocytic membranes.
2
A History of Genomic Structures: The Big Picture
Nicolas Carels
- 01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: A comprehensive compilation of genomic structure evolution that should help the reader who is not familiar with genomics to understand the mechanisms that are shaping its structures over time and gives a constructive view of the life journey to the reader.
2
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Vivek Sharma,Arto Annila +1 more
TL;DR: It is proposed that the rate of entropy production by various mechanisms is the fitness criterion of natural selection and results in organization of matter in functional hierarchies.
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
Raghavendra Gadagkar
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TL;DR: The theory that biological species are descended from common ancestors provides an indispensable heuristic to understand why living organisms are what they are and do what they do.
Why did life emerge
Arto Annila,Erkki Annila +1 more
TL;DR: The rate of entropy increase is identified as the fitness criterion among the diverse mechanisms, which places the theory of evolution by natural selection on the fundamental thermodynamic principle with no demarcation line between inanimate and animate.
A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry
TL;DR: Among a wide range of biological models involving the independent ancestry of major taxonomic groups, the model selection tests are found to overwhelmingly support UCA irrespective of the presence of horizontal gene transfer and symbiotic fusion events, providing powerful statistical evidence corroborating the monophyly of all known life.