Common descent
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In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share common descent if they have a common ancestor. There is strong evidence that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor, called the last universal ancestor or LUA (or last universal common ancestor, LUCA).
Common ancestry between organisms of different species arises during speciation, in which new species are established from a single ancestral population. Organisms which share a more recent common ancestor are more closely related. The most recent common ancestor of all currently living organisms is the last universal ancestor, which lived about 3.9 billion years ago. Thus all currently living organisms on Earth share a common genetic heritage (universal common descent), with each being the descendant from a single original species, though the suggestion of substantial horizontal gene transfer during early evolution has led to questions about monophyly of life.
Universal common descent through an evolutionary process, that there was only one progenitor for all life forms, was first proposed by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species, which ended with "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one". The theory has been recently popularized by Richard Dawkins, in The Ancestor's Tale, and others.
Evolution
- Overview
- Introduction to evolution
- Evolution
- Evolution as theory and fact
- Evolutionary history of life
- Timeline of evolution
- History
- History of evolutionary thought
- Lamarckism
- Saltationism
- Orthogenesis
- On the Origin of Species
- Darwinism
- The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection
- Neo-Darwinism
- Modern evolutionary synthesis
- Base concepts
- Heredity
- Fitness
- Common descent
- Evidence of common descent
- Phylogenetics
- Phylogenetics
- Cladistics
- Cladogram
- Molecular phylogenetics
- Fields
- Evolutionary developmental biology
- Molecular evolution
- Human evolution
- Evolutionary psychology
- Controversy and social impacts
- Creation–evolution controversy
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- Creationism
- Intelligent design
- Social effect of evolutionary theory