All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
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What does LUCA tell us about the tree of life?
And if you follow any two branches back in time, they converge on their most recent common ancestor. So like chimps and humans, for instance, converge on a common ancestor that lived like less than 10 million years ago. If you keep tracing any path of ancestry back far enough, whether you start with gorillas or sharks or ginkgo trees or those neat bacteria that live in the bowels of the earth, you'll eventually reach the same single point. That's Luca. That's the ancestor of every living thing and every dead thing that we know about.
Grandma. Wow. That's awesome. Why do we want to know about Luca?
Scientists want to understand what it was like because it gets at this really fundamental question of where we, as in all life on Earth, came from. And here's a new development. A team of scientists took the biggest swing yet at trying to paint a picture of Luca through some pretty tricky detective work.
So today on the show, how scientists use clues from life today to uncover what our last universal common ancestor may have looked like.
how it could be a bit older and more complicated than we thought, and if true, could hint that we're not the only life in the universe.
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How do scientists study LUCA?
From lowbrow to highbrow to the stuff in between, catch the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. On NPR's ThruLine. Witnesses were ending up dead. How the hunt for gangster Al Capone launched the IRS to power. Find NPR's ThruLine wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's back up a second, John. How do we even know that Luca, who I fully believe in, but still, how do we know that Luca existed?
Evidence that it existed is hidden in every living thing. So we all share some basic fundamental machinery of life, things like a genetic code or using amino acids to build proteins.
I thought it was the desire to belong and, you know, have friends. Not that.
Yeah, yeah, not that. And given what we know about how evolution works, that genes get passed down from generation to generation, it follows that something like LUCA must have existed.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is LUCA and why is it important?
1:57
2
What does LUCA tell us about the tree of life?
1:25–3:33
3
How do scientists study LUCA?
3:33–5:04
4
What challenges do researchers face in identifying LUCA?
5:04–6:40
5
What new insights have emerged about LUCA?
6:40
6
How do horizontal gene transfers complicate our understanding of LUCA?
5:56–15:50
Speakers
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