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Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)

Genomic sequences across diverse species seem to align towards a common ancestry, eventually implying that eons ago some universal antecedent organism would have lived on the face of Earth. However, when evolution is understood not only as a biological process but as a general thermodynamic process,...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Koskela, Minna, Annila, Arto
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3899962/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24704844
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genes3010081
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author Koskela, Minna
Annila, Arto
author_facet Koskela, Minna
Annila, Arto
author_sort Koskela, Minna
collection PubMed
description Genomic sequences across diverse species seem to align towards a common ancestry, eventually implying that eons ago some universal antecedent organism would have lived on the face of Earth. However, when evolution is understood not only as a biological process but as a general thermodynamic process, it becomes apparent that the quest for the last universal common ancestor is unattainable. Ambiguities in alignments are unavoidable because the driving forces and paths of evolution cannot be separated from each other. Thus tracking down life’s origin is by its nature a non-computable task. The thermodynamic tenet clarifies that evolution is a path-dependent process of least-time consumption of free energy. The natural process is without a demarcation line between animate and inanimate.
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spelling pubmed-38999622014-03-26 Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) Koskela, Minna Annila, Arto Genes (Basel) Article Genomic sequences across diverse species seem to align towards a common ancestry, eventually implying that eons ago some universal antecedent organism would have lived on the face of Earth. However, when evolution is understood not only as a biological process but as a general thermodynamic process, it becomes apparent that the quest for the last universal common ancestor is unattainable. Ambiguities in alignments are unavoidable because the driving forces and paths of evolution cannot be separated from each other. Thus tracking down life’s origin is by its nature a non-computable task. The thermodynamic tenet clarifies that evolution is a path-dependent process of least-time consumption of free energy. The natural process is without a demarcation line between animate and inanimate. MDPI 2012-01-09 /pmc/articles/PMC3899962/ /pubmed/24704844 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genes3010081 Text en © 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Koskela, Minna
Annila, Arto
Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
title Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
title_full Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
title_fullStr Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
title_full_unstemmed Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
title_short Looking for the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)
title_sort looking for the last universal common ancestor (luca)
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3899962/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24704844
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/genes3010081
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