Last universal common ancestor

And tricking people into thinking we don’t know anything about the origin of life doesn’t in any way validate the dumb stories you believe.

Then there's the whole progress of how does life evolve from that first LUCA, that first last universal common ancestor, presumed that first cell.

How does that go to multicellular organisms and then all the complexity of life that we see today?

LUCA wasn’t the first cell, you fucking idiot.

It’s just the last universal common ancestor.

It’s the ancestral cell population from which the extant domains of life evolved.

There were at least a billion years between the first protocell and LUCA.

You don’t even know what any of these terms mean.

Okay, back at your right bicep, we had Luca, the single-celled, great-times-infinity grandparent of every cactus, shark, and human on Earth.

It's Last Universal Common Ancestor, L-U-C-A.

But by 2.7 billion years ago, Luca's descendants, cyanobacteria, were taking over.

Earth's oceans were covered with these microbes, and they did something special, something that almost ended life on Earth at that time.

So most of or- all of origin of life is getting to that first cell.

LUCA, it's called, the last universal common ancestor.

This is why you shouldn't be talking about origin of life research either.

LUCA was not the first cell, dumbass.

It was the last universal common ancestor.

See how the word last in there implies there was other alive stuff before it, so even people who don't know what it means would be able to surmise that it wasn't the first cell? Yeah.

The balls you have to have to present yourself as an authority in this area and not even know what LUCA is, it's fucking astounding.

Anyway, let's listen to James fumble ninth grade evolutionary biology for a while.

It's organizing.

Eventually, all these innovations come together in something we called LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, not the first life, just the ancestor whose descendants are still here.

And LUCA has children.

Lots of them.

They spread across the planet and eventually go their separate ways, like kids moving out of a house.

If you imagine the tree of life with millions of species living today, and we were talking earlier about how species share a common ancestor, and geneticists are able to use molecular dating methods to estimate how much time has passed since two species met.

shared a common ancestor humans and apes share a common ancestor if you go back further all mammals share a common ancestor you can keep going back tracing ancestral species and you come back to a species that would have existed a long time ago that was ancestral to all living organisms The last universal common ancestor.

L-U-C-A.

Exactly.

The first cells, we don't know what the first cells were like, but they would have had to be very simple compared to even what we think LUCA was like.

LUCA is an acronym for Last Universal Common Ancestor.

It represents the first earliest cell that all life originated from.

LUCA had all sorts of capabilities already.