Talk:Last universal common ancestor/Archives/2013/December

Is there debate?

I gather that the following is not a fair characterization of Dr. Doolittle's work: Uprooting the Tree of Life by W. Ford Doolittle (Scientific American, February 2000, pp 72-77) contains a discussion of the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and the problems that arose with respect to that concept when one considers horizontal gene transfer. I do not have access to Scientific American, so I cannot make a determination. If there is non-pseudoscience debate, should we not include it? --Bejnar (talk) 00:01, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

Any legitimate/non-pseudoscience debate about LUCA's existence ended in 2010, with a landmark paper already cited in this Article. Horizontal gene transfer does not cancel out the existence of LUCA; it only pushes back the date when LUCA would have lived. This was the conclusion of a paradigm-setting paper, and you're referring to a paper from 10 years before that.

As Theobald (2010) calculated from the genetic record (and in particular the universal use of the same genetic code, same nucleotides, and same amino acids), the factor in favor of LUCA's existence is 10³⁴⁸⁹. As you know, 10³⁴⁸⁹ is 1 with three thousand four hundred eighty-nine 0's after it! That is the number of times more likely that LUCA existed rather than not. The Mysterious El Willstro (talk) 21:14, 13 December 2013 (UTC)