Last Universal Common Ancestor

Cypress said:
Because of our western tradition, our language is littered with biblical allusion: be a good Samaritan, the truth shall set you free, do onto others.... it's just become part of our lexicon.

I don't begrudge journalists for trying to find a catchy and memorable way to illustrate a concept. Microbial Eve as a rhetorical prop gets the general scientific idea across in two words, what it might take a paragraph to describe in technical detail.
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You either believe the Bible or you don't! You're an atheist so you have no opinion.
 
There is a big gap between those working backwards through genetics to LUCA, from those working forward through biochemistry to peptides and RNA precursors. That's what makes this scientific question so bloody compelling.

The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is an inferred evolutionary intermediate that links the abiotic phase of Earth's history with the first traces of microbial life in rocks that are 3.8–3.5 billion years of age.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmi...n inferred evolutionary,billion years of age2.
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ThatOwlWoman said:
I'm glad that for once they didn't give it some Biblical name.
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The God bacteria. :)

The Earth is only about 4.5B years old so LUCA came along relatively early in its existence.

An SF story I once read (Larry Niven?) wrote about spacefarers landing on a sterile planet for repairs and then dumping their biological waste before leaving. They wondered what the planet would look like in a few billion years.

A Biblical version of that story would be “And lo! God sent angels from Heaven to descend upon the Earth where they lifted their robes and gave life to the Earth”.
 
I AM said:
I read it and believe it. You are an atheist that loves to so seeds of doubt! You're really a piece of shit in fancy wrappers .Basically a name dropper.
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Thanks, once again, Mason for proving you are not walking in the path of Jesus.
 
I AM said:
You either believe the Bible or you don't! You're an atheist so you have no opinion.
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QED. Mason hates his neighbor, is the first to cast stones and constantly judges others. Ergo, he’s not a Christian.
 
Doc Dutch said:
The God bacteria. :)

The Earth is only about 4.5B years old so LUCA came along relatively early in its existence.

An SF story I once read (Larry Niven?) wrote about spacefarers landing on a sterile planet for repairs and then dumping their biological waste before leaving. They wondered what the planet would look like in a few billion years.

A Biblical version of that story would be “And lo! God sent angels from Heaven to descend upon the Earth where they lifted their robes and gave life to the Earth”.
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One thing that strikes me is that LUCA implies life only originated and evolved once on earth; everything else has been speciation and descent with modification.

Maybe other strands of life arose and quickly died out leaving only LUCA, but there's no evidence of that.

If life is something that is inevitable and easily arises in the presence of water and organic molecules, it seems curious that life only arose once in four billion years here.

That's the kind of thing that makes me wonder if life is rare in the galaxy
 
Cypress said:
I think you are the first person since I registered here 16 years ago to call me an Atheist Piece of Shit
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That would be truly ironic given that you are a general defender of religious thought. Your negative response to atheists speaking about the Bible was a great indicator that you are anything but an "atheist piece of shit".
 
BidenPresident said:
You always talk about religion, obsessively, then claim to not be religious. It's comical.
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The poster does take a dim view of atheists when they discuss the Pentateuch. If one raises some of the more theologically problematic stuff Cypress gets really upset. He suggested I was an antisemite because I mentioned some of the violence in the Old Testament.

I sense Cypress is still very religious at heart. And that's cool. It's OK to be religious and it's OK to be respectful of someone's religious leanings.
 
NovoJank said:
The poster does take a dim view of atheists when they discuss the Pentateuch. If one raises some of the more theologically problematic stuff Cypress gets really upset. He suggested I was an antisemite because I mentioned some of the violence in the Old Testament.

I sense Cypress is still very religious at heart. And that's cool. It's OK to be religious and it's OK to be respectful of someone's religious leanings.
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Ok. I do not give a shit about religion. It is boring.
 
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