Betül Kaçar

It may indicate that a great deal of chemical evolution and this may...

indicate that a lot of selection pressure and Darwinian evolution happened prior to the rise of the last universal common ancestor.

Because this is almost a bridge that connects the earliest cells to the last universal common ancestor.

Yes, so when we talk about the tree, when we think about the root, if you ideally included all the living information or all the available information that comes from living organisms on your tree, then on the root of your tree lies the last universal common ancestor, Lukau.

We call it the last because it is sort of the first one that we can track because we don't know what we cannot track, right?

It's more like, I would think of it as more like a population, a group of organisms than a single- Okay, hold on a second.

Do you want me to be...

So first of all, it's not 3.5 is still a very conservative estimate.

I would say it's 3.8 is probably safer to say at this point.

If you put an approximately, I'll take that.

Well, you're still a group of cells.

You mean like you versus Luca?

Are you relating to Luca right now?

No, no, no.

So you defy the code of Douglas Adams.

You are proud of your ancestors and you invite them over to dinner and you invite them over to your Twitter account.

Yes, it's almost intelligence at the chemical level, and this is also probably one of the first chemically intelligent systems that evolved by itself in nature.

In its own way, and again, if we manage to figure out how to drive life's evolution, if it can evolve a sophisticated sort of informatic processing system like this, you may ask yourself, what might chemical systems do?

be capable of independently doing under different circumstances.

So that's a great segue into what makes this biological, right?