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Post details: Thinkquote of the day 1: Key origin of life researcher doubts that there was a single common ancestor

08/21/06

by Denyse O'Leary 05:54:45 am, Categories: Commentary - OpEd, 341 words

Thinkquote of the day 1: Key origin of life researcher doubts that there was a single common ancestor

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In 1998, Woese wrote: “No consistent organismal phylogeny has emerged from the many individual protein phylogenies so far produced.” He concluded that primitive organisms acquired many of their genes and proteins, not by Darwinian descent with modification, but by “lateral gene transfer” from other organisms. “The universal ancestor,”
he wrote,” is not an entity, a thing,” but a community of complex molecules—a sort of primordial soup—from which different kinds of cells emerged independently.

- from Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design , p. 44, (Carl Woese quoted from "The universal ancestor," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 95 (1998): 6854-59.)

That, of course, creates an interesting question: If the origin of life is as immensely improbable as Fred Hoyle and Francis Crick thought, how would it happen more than once, as Woese's comments imply?

Note: Stephen E. Jones from Creation/Evolution/Design kindly comments:

I presume Woese means the *last* universal ancestor" (LUCA) of all organisms *alive today*, not the *first* common ancestor, i.e. of *all* life that has *ever lived*.

Because nucleic acids and proteins don't fossilise, at least not back ~4 billion years, that is all Woese's molecular phylogenies can get back to, i.e. the last universal common ancestor of all *living* organisms, which is a tiny subset of all organisms that have *ever* lived.

That there is a difference between *last* common ancestor and *first* common ancestor is evident in humans when the *last* common ancestor of all humans *alive today* is estimated to have lived only in 1,415BC [http://tinyurl.com/efh23], and yet modern humans have been in Australia since at least 40,000 years ago [http://tinyurl.com/jvoer ].

Stephen E. Jones

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain (Harper 2007).

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