We have only ourselves to blame that so many people don't understand evolution. That tree is accurate, but it doesn't show that there are an uncountable number of other trees that no longer exist. The existence of a LUCA is because all other possible ancestors, and their entire clades, died out.
Don't beat yourself up. We haven't found any evidence for transitional forms (the supposed nodes between the branches). Each kind of creature just "appears" in the fossil record with no transitions between kinds. Over a billion fossils are catalogued there should be a plethora of transitional kinds, but we don't find them. Check it out. Bats are just bats, and so on ... Darwin himself said it would be the most serious objection to his theory. No wonder evolution is so "difficult to understand". For a long time, I used to buy it, but now I believe Jesus instead. He forgives!
i agree that evolution should be better understood. When I went to school in England in the 60s we were never taught anything about Darwin, evolution or natural selection, even though they are so simple that even a child can understand. I still feel angry about it today.
And it might be the success of LUCA (or it's ancestors or descendants) specifically that caused them to be wiped out. Competing for the same resources etc.
Thank you Anton, for making what was likely a very dense research paper into a video that was much more palatable for those of us who have diverse interests in science, but who lack the deep technical background to digest the info from the source. I've followed LUCA and genomics for many years, which gives me a better ability to understand the terms and concepts you've presented, but my gawd that was a dense presentation!! Well done And thanks again.
The important thing is that LUCA was not the first living organism. It was just the last that all modern life comes from. There were probably other branches of the evolution tree at the time of LUCA but all of them have died out. And it does not make the organism extraordinary. By definition there must have been a LUCA.
(Edit for clearity, a LUCA for all life) Well there doesnt *have* to be a LUCIA. You could have biogensis occur multiple times even on planet Earth. Heck it might be a common-ish event to this day just one that we havent observed and wouldnt be likely to accidentally observe. Rather a LUCIA suggests that the avalible avenues for life emerging are either rare enough that once one lifeform started it outceompeated all other life forms that have since emerged OR that the protien sequences avalible to become a self replicating life in any given enviroment (or at least our given enviroment) where limited and always became DNA, and RNA that was capable of some amount of horizontal gene transfer when life forms are new, thus their DNA shows up like a mutation. Or a combo of both.
> By definition there must have been a LUCA Not by definition. That relies on the fact that all modern life has a common origin in the first place. That's extremely likely given the evidence, but it isn't true by definition.
There was probably a period where simpler more fragile organisms were forming, developing, and ultimately going extinct Until a convergence of more stable conditions and codependent system of life forms keep the flame of life going
How could something alive come from something that was previously not alive? The chicken and the egg isn’t just a metaphor, it’s true that you cannot have one without the other.
@@t.walker3101 The definition of what is considered “alive” is kinda all over the place. For example there’s still a big debate on whether or not viruses are alive due to how simple they are.
@@t.walker3101same way an engine starts. An external force replicates of the motions of a running engine to the point where those motions of a running engine allow the engine to sustain itself and actually become a running engine. So unalive activity happened to act as if it was alive because of the massive potential for randomness that this planet has. Once that activity became self sustaining without being acted upon by randomness, then it became alive.
@t.walker3101 Are you suggesting it was the work of one of the thousands of indemonstrable, magical worship wizards that humans have invented over the last few thousand years?
it's none sense.. all organism have membranes so they find the same dna for membrane making and say look similarities between animals and micro organisms. it's circular argument.
If youll allow me to go off on a tangent, many years ago I read in the Farmers Almanac that all humans are related (mathematically at least) to all other humans by no more than 30th cousin. Made me imagine writing a letter to Queen Elizabeth and starting with the salutation "Dear Cuz."
Yeah no way. If it takes a generous 30 years to make the next generation, that's 30*30 = 900 years. I'm pretty sure there's uncontacted tribes in the Amazon that are not related to me past their ancestors crossing the Bering Strait. And Aborigines. There is a number, but it's not 30.
I have never regretted subscribing to your channel. Every time I come back I enjoy the way you share your passion for all of the new science happening around us. Thank you. People will always need to learn, and you are helping them do that.
My name is LUCA I lived some 4 billion years ago I’m the ancestor of all of extant biota Yes, I’m the OG, don’t you know? [Chorus] If you feel something deep inside Some primal urge, that’s were my genes still reside Just don’t ask me how life first began Just don’t ask me how life first began Just don’t ask me how life first began
LUCA, like Mitochondrial Eve and Y chromosome Adam were neither first nor alone. They just happen to be the single organism from which all other descendants derive. Given that many species go extinct, LUCA is a movable designation. It is likely that every mass extinction event shifted which organism had the title LUCA forward to a new common ancestor.
@@stagnant-name5851 I think that blacksmith67 means that if, at a certain moment in the history of life, all members of an early branch of LUCA's descendants were to die off, the LUCA designation could shift to a later organism whose descendants included all surviving life (excluding the newly extinct branch).
LUCA is a virtual organism. They are making models of what it might be. So, while LUCA can mean one thing, it also means many things at the same time, It does not depend on the mass extinction because whatever survived the mass extinctions still carries forward the genetic history of what LUCA might have been.
yes every time an ancient branch died off, if they did, it would shift. but i think we havent discovered any such event simply because we dont know all primordial branches all the way back then
@@jem2017 Exactly so, but it doesn’t require an entire branch to die off, it just requires that the last descendants in a branch die off. The last common ancestor of all mammals would shift with the death of the few species of monotremes that are left.
9:25 - A MINIMUM age of 4.2 billion years. That lines up really well with the Jack Hills Zircons from Australia, which showed enrichment of the kind of carbon isotopes you only see when carbon sources have been processed by living organisms. That also means life SURVIVED the Late Heavy Bombardment, which is an impressive achievement. Another thing is that an age like that does add a little more strength to the argument for panspermia because of the kind of complexity of the community LUCA likely lived in. Going from zero to that level of complexity in less than 200 million years is awfully fast.
Panspermia, as a theory, or rather hypothesis, is something I've always seen as a cop-out. It doesn't answer the real question of how life comes from non-life, just kicks the question down the road, so to speak.
@@douglasthompson201I know, dude. That’s the craziest fucking part to me. Like, at one point, did the right amount of molecules, energy, and nutrients JUST COME TOGETHER and start moving and replicating and shit? If you go back far enough, scientists and creationists say the same shit! Life just pops into existence!
Not a surprise and no coincedence. On purpose. I even think earth was created at this same spot for that purpose. And we learn about the history now, is because we have the tools and the right education, curiosity, attention and intelligence. Life started as an experiment, a learning and creating and evolving proces. Not perfect. Not ready, but very interesting. The 'why' is still unexplained but in the meanwhile we are able to enjoy a fascinating display of possibilities.
Things like this just make me think more and more that life is probably very vast, i believe it will be very common on planets with the right conditions, and with enough time it will evolve.
Sure, but it should be pointed out that organic chemistry replicating (and life itself) came a couple billion years before LUCA. LUCA would be a fairly recent life form in the total history of life on Earth.
@@duncanmountford8426 I replicate, therefore I am. Humans are made of 36 trillion Eukaryote cells consisting of organic chemistry machines. These cells evolve over time as DNA mistakes change their behavior. Pretty much the rule of molecular biology.
One thought that few talk about outside of academia is that cell walls are not reproduced by DNA or RNA encoded genes. The membrane that surrounded LUCA has been stretched, separated and grown with every cell division for approximately 4 billion years.
So everything inside the cell works through dna but the cell wall is actually a separate structure that‘s just kind of there and works completely on its own?
@@realrebelli0n Cell walls are coded for -- there's features on them that are selected for and against. Something has to make the lipids in the phospholipid bilayer. But it does form into a droplet with a cavity when in water due to having two hydrophobic ends and two hydrophilic ends, so it can self-assemble when in water. I think the OP is talking about how cells divide to create new cells, so it's kind of like the same cell wall has been shared among all life. But the extra material is still generated by the cells via instructions from DNA/RNA. It's a bit like the Ship of Theseus -- when all the parts have been completely replaced at what point is it a new boat?
I think you mean cell membrane Also they are coded for(at least there is code for repairing and expanding the membrane). But yes organisms don't have the code to make one from scratch. Although its actually even more unclear than that. We don't actually know if the first cell membrane was something that formed through non biological phiscial processes that was then just inhabited by some self replicating molecule. Or if some self replicating molecule evoved to envelop itself under certain condition. Or something inbetween. There are a bunch of possiblities for how the first cell membranes came into existance.
Thanks Anton! Hey my friend there are two kinds of underwater vents. Your video showed "smokers." The dark ones. Most agree life began with the lighter colored ones. They are alkali or something. Something needed for life.
That would be an interesting storyline or hard-sci-fi movie topic. One small subtle change 4 billion years ago and life is completely different. Or maybe it's pretty much the same thing! Cool to think about though.
amazing! it kind of fits that a first thing that duplicated itself was around in the hot water before anything was alive, then randomly some of them were like, Hey, what's with the bad hair? Oh, you're not alive. My bad. Hey you, over there!
I think large parts of this video fall into a very common misconception about LUCA. LUCA is not necessarily an organism or species. Our only empirical understanding of LUCA is as a collection of genes. Just as the K-12 and Shigella strains in E. coli are extremely distinct phenotypically, proto-archaea and bacteria may have existed in the LUCA era with the same pan-LUCA genome. The fuzziness between strains, species, and higher order taxa almost certainly existed in the LUCA era and means there may be no objective LUCA genome or organism. It is challenging to put dates on the LUCA era for similar reasons.
I have been interested in the origin of viruses for a long time so I will watch all of those future videos. Lots of questions about how that happened and at what costs and advantages.
There is something almost frightening to think that the Earth as it is today would probably be unable to create life spontaneously! I don't know if frightening is the right word... maybe awe-inspiring.
@@mdean3801 except that Susan Vega's Luka gets beat up regularly by her significant other: "Yes I think I'm okay, walked into the door again ... If you hear something late at night, some kind of trouble, some kind of fight. Please don't ask me what it was."
Nightwish have a song is inspired by Dawkins’ book of the same name, The Greatest Show on Earth. It covers 4.6 billion years to the present, Uses quotes from his book that are read by him, mentions LUCA, and, if you choose to check it out and watch the Live At Wembley 2015 version to the very end, even has him live on stage quoting from the origin of species. A compositional masterpiece.
It's worth noting that _probably_ hard upper limit on when life formed is probably the Theia Impact event. It's one thing for life to endure through the Late Heavy Bombardment, the collision that probably formed the moon would have turned the planet into a ball of magma. That said, we don't know exactly when that happened.
Imagine a "what if" scenario: The first life, life analog, or organic thingy that became life eventually, was actually 2 different organisms the were very very similar albeit originating independently from one another from the hypothesized aminoacid soup, and both lines survived to the present day, meaning there are no luca OR fuca
I would like to point out this: think about Darwin Finches, in less that 5000 years, they diversified so much that some are completely different from the original Finches! And I not talking about Suttle differences, some body part are completely different. If they done that imagine what life can do in 100 millions years...
And once we figure out the identity of LUCA, then there's the neat aspect of realizing that each of us is just the newest link in a chain that goes back over 4 billion years without a single break.
there was a sci fi show that the alien culture was built on remembering the names of every ancestor in your line... can you imagine extending back to first mammal, first chordate, etc
My name is Luca,I live on the second floor😂(joke),with all the trillions of galaxies in space,most likely harbour intelligent life,we just can’t observe them yet,maybe they’re observing us long before we even knew about our own galaxy!.✌️♥️
The LUCA is similar to Rhodopseudomonas palustris It metabolizers and fixes CO2, in metabolizers and fixes nitrogen, it’s photosynthetic, metabolizes, hydrogen, sulfur, and iron. it’s the most versatile organism on earth
It's fascinating how life seems to always be experimenting with various forms in order to reach some new paradigm. It makes me wonder what's coming next. It could be something incomprehensible to us now.
Its not experimenting at all, it’s providing excellent designs throughout its entire history, not only excellent specimens, but excellent ecosystems adapting to ever-changing environment.
Since we know the broad time period for life’s development those geologists and paleontologists know how early to look. Although it’s quite hard to find the remnants of squishy things in rocks, but since they lived near silts there may be something to find. Awesome!
It seems more and more that life evolved as soon as it possibly could on Earth and intelligent life evolved almost towards the end (one billion years until the sun hot enough to lead to runaway greenhouse). Contrary to Robin Hanson who thinks abiogenesis is more likely to be the harder step and that there's no hard jump between microbes and social animals, I would suggest that life is extremely common but intelligent or even social or even multicellular life is rare. There may have been some difficult and unlikely step that occurred on Earth to kick off multicellular life as the "Boring Billion" ended.
@@bjornfeuerbacher5514 I don't buy it, because I think the human hand is pretty vital for making us what we are, and we'd see some fossil evidence of creatures evolving towards having comparable manipulators.
@@ForwardSynthesis First, I wouldn't say that human hands are the only possibility. Second, there are examples of quite complicated reptilian claws. Third, the fossil record still is quite spotty.
Essentially from scratch we can build a nuclear-powered Gerald R. Ford Class aircraft carrier, (replete with aircraft, radar, weapon-systems etc.) but we haven't a clue of how to build LUCA.
Quite easily, those with less brain development evolved it to modify its behaviour. Because they always kept being useful. More complex cognition happened much later. Instincts are still essential for us. The exact genetic encoding will be more complex.
The samme way as for all animals, insects, bacteria, viruses, earth worms, lice, and everything else that has the ability to get offspring. Only those with the right behavior (instincts) survive and get offspring. The others die off...
@@spiralsun1 What Da Math was what he used to do before his current format. He would explain concepts (usually space related) by using video games like Universe Sandbox
When life appeared on Earth, the galaxy was already at least 9 or10 billion years old, and the late bombardment meteorites had to originate somewhere outside Earth. Potentially, our galaxy could have collided with other passing galaxies and the probability that LUCA originated elsewhere than Earth is high, so we may never know what the conditions under which life started were like. Maybe some long dead world, who can tell? Maybe a remnant of Theia, even?
I tried reading the bible once, but the writing was terrible. I've heard the story of Cain and Able being described as so "deep and meaningful" or whatever but it was like 2 sentences long. Is there a full version somewhere, or is it really just "so yeah there was Cain and Abel, they tried giving gifts to god and god only liked the other one so his brother robloxed him."
I suspect panspermia is what brought life to Earth, and I expect both LUCA and its viruses arrived together. We really need to be closely examining comets where they might still be abundant.
it's definitely possible can't live on a planet full of life and know what we know about comets and asteroids and not think it's possible but still doesn't answer the question of where did that life come did it randomly come together on some other planet or maybe even in space some nebula
It is frustrating that so many people, even those in the different scientific domains, do not understand that life is simply another manifestation of entropy. Self organising entropy. As the universe expands and its uncountable and unimaginably tiny bits interact with each other, life is bound to occur. In many places.
Imagine going back in time and squishing our most-common ancestor, coming back, and seeing basically all life rerolling into completely different things with completely different orders of dominance. Heck, we could have been the least-productive and least-intelligent dominant species of the multiverse of possibilities purely by a missed exposure to a rogue unit of virus.
this has nothing to do with the anton video but i just wanna tell everybody that if you press "back" and then "forward" on ur browser u can skip ads. ur welcome
Adinine is a very important precursor molecule in atp/adp, rna and dna, so it seems likely to have come early. Maybe because of the elements that it's made of, a meteor or dry ice (co2) coated in liquid nitrogen (n) hitting the upper hydrogen atmosphere (h2) could have made pockets of it if it were the right size and angle. What it might do from there I wonder about. I've thought that before having competition, photosynthetic would probably extract co2, freeze water over it, and then evolved to go deeper with more specialized wavelength photosynthesis, but then if reaching thermal vents did anything immediately or what I don't know.
Life is like video games. Some game comes along, like DOOM, and revolutionized gaming. Sure, by today's standards it sucks, but back when it was released, there was nothing like it and it dominated everything.
LUCA most definitely is one of these monster of a game that wiped everything else off of the map, like pong. I'd bet the winning evolutionary leap of luca is the Chiralality of Biological Molecules we see in all life today.
As a barbarian, my pet peeve is explaining the concept of LUCA to vegans ❤ 😂 ps. if you are in any way interested in this topic, I can't recommend Nightwish's (symphonic metal) concept album *Endless Forms most Beautiful* that was done inspired by and in co-operation with Richard Dawkins (he narrates parts and even joined on stage during some live shows). Especially the song The Greatest Show on Earth (live at Tampere version) is my personal favourite, it is a tribute to life of Earth, since it's beginning to the end
No, no, no. The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) is NOT an organism that "everything or Earth came from". LUCA is the latest organism that is the common ancestor from all organisms that are living TODAY. LUCA was NOT the organism that "began it all". There may have been a long evolutionary history further back in time, with competing forms of life, and life may even have started several times, but the descendants of the others died out.
My name is Luca. I live on the second floor. I live upstairs from you. Yes, I think you've seen me before. If you hear something late at night. Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight. Just don't ask me what it was - Suzanne Vega
Archaeobiology and results of large scale genetic research are so intriguing, thanx for your videos! I'm spiraling on a dumb question: if oxigen started to exist 2 billion years ago, why do we need to assume more ancient anaerobial life forms were acquatic? Does this depend on the formation of glico something partially water repellent membranes?
That 3-D cell rendering at 2:08 is gorgeous. All the others I have seen look drab compared to that. It looks a little like Grogu's floating hover cab. Any chance of getting access to where that video was generated?
If we did find something out there that did look a lot like planet Earth, it would seem that would make for better odds of that planet also having evolved for a long time. However, the series of catastrophes our planet experienced may have either been the trigger, or a set-back/restart. And "the Goldilocks zone' we seem to have defined is only for our exact type star and would seemingly mean a completely different planetary and life level 'evolution'. Were we to find a "nice, green planet" somewhere, it could be brand new. It could be plant life only. We just do not know. That thing you showed stating that it is thought to be our genesis looked pretty "seed-like". Maybe Earth was showered with such things and evolution is real and did take millions of years but were we STILL seeded, and we are the result. Just one conjecture... It looks like a seed. :-)
re. FUCA - I'm far from being an expert. But it seems to me that the environmental conditions which gave rise to the first life forms may have persisted long enough to give rise to several different life forms. So yes, it seems reasonable that there was already a diversity of life before LUCA. But I wonder why biologists think that all later life emerged from only ONE Of those earlier forms. What is the basis for this assumption?
It’s not an assumption that all life came from only one lifeform, it’s that by definition there must have been only a single last universal common ancestor, the most recent one organism who’s descendants make up all extant life. If all extant life didn’t emerge from this single organism, then it isn’t the LUCA. The only way for there to not be a LUCA for all life on earth would be for there to have been multiple events of abiogenesis, and then for the lifeforms that came from these multiple events to all survive to the current day, which we know isn’t the case, because all life on earth today shares a set of characteristics, which points to common descent
LUCA wasn't the only survivor. It is simply the last organism all modern life is related to. Modern life is related to plenty of other organisms, just not ones all modern life is related to.
This puts LUCA a few hundred millions of years away from the origin of life. I further propose that LUCA might not have been a single species of organism, rather a collection of a few different one.
4:20 "LUCA was not the first form of life" how did you guys missed on this? This is the potential explanation for the whole existence of viruses, which in a comparison of metaphors is like having an vine in the tree of life and that makes them their own "life" so to speak.
Viruses leave fragments in our DNA, and a timeline across species. If those fragments are released during development, the corresponding antigens could be detected as the immune systems develop as well. This embryonic development of the immune system should also reflect evolution. A record of how DNA works, and when certain genes are activated to create us and our immune system.
