Another Last Universal Common Ancestor Story
When talking about origins, several words and phrases are used but people usually know the topic because of the context. Neo-Darwinian synthesis is cumbersome, some say Neo-Darwinism, descent with modifications, and more.
The short form, Darwinism, raises hackles on some folks: "Nobody believes that anymore!" and then use his version of natural selection, saying, "Natural selection is evolution." (Or worse, that it is science!) Common descent is also used. They want to find the last universal common ancestor that supposedly ties all living things together.
Swamp near Hudson River, Unsplash / Cowboy Bob Sorensen (modified at photofunny) |
Evolutionists utilize a theoretical tree of life that takes people, plants, and animals back into deep evolutionary time to an unobserved, unknown, hypothetical last universal common ancestor (LUCA). Whatever this organism was, they maintain, it was the ancestor of all life and evolved in turn from nonliving chemicals.In July of 2024, Science magazine confidently reported, “The last ancestor shared by all living organisms was a microbe that lived 4.2 billion years ago, had a fairly large genome encoding some 2600 proteins, enjoyed a diet of hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide, and harbored a rudimentary immune system for fighting off viral invaders.”
To read about the audacity of those evolutionists, see "Evolution's Hypothetical Last Universal Common Ancestor."