No, I wasn’t stoned. This thought was inspired by the post the other day about how trees evolved independently (e: multiple times) from different plants, the product of convergent evolution.
No, I wasn’t stoned. This thought was inspired by the post the other day about how trees evolved independently (e: multiple times) from different plants, the product of convergent evolution.
What if a bunch of the earliest life spontaneously formed by the millions independently in different places? Would we all really have a true single common ancestor then?
Edit: I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I believe that all life on earth came from the same “species”, being the same kind of structure spontaneously generated in the primordial soup, but that there could’ve been a number of those structures that were generated and were all identical to each other. This would mean that any of them could evolve from the same starting point in terms of “design”, but not literally be the exact same object, meaning that we could have a number of origin ancestors that were all identical, and were potentially not an exact one singular living thing.
Some (probably bacteria-like) form of life appeared almost as soon as conditions made it possible, so it’s conceivable that it arose multiple times in earth’s history. But eucaryotes (animals, plants, and fungi) took almost half the lifetime of the earth to appear, and have a lot of contingent features, so it’s overwhelmingly likely that all eucaryotes have a common ancestor.
It’s almost a certainly that all current life on earth has the same common ancestors. It makes sense for a ton of reasons.
For example all living organism have dna, and they all use the same 4 nucleic acids that their dna is made from. Neither of those facts are necessary requirements for life to exist, so since 100% of life does both of those things then that’s very strong evidence that 100% of life had a common ancestor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_life
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor