Characteristic of a group of organisms with a common ancestor
For use of the term in linguistics and philology, see Comparative method, Historical linguistics, Proto-language, and Textual criticism.
"Common ancestor" redirects here. For use of the term in graph theory, see Lowest common ancestor.
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Common descent is a concept in evolutionary biology applicable when one species is the ancestor of two or more species later in time. According to modern evolutionary biology, all living beings could be descendants of a unique ancestor commonly referred to as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all life on Earth.[1][2][3][4]
Common descent is an effect of speciation, in which multiple species derive from a single ancestral population. The more recent the ancestral population two species have in common, the more closely are they related. The most recent common ancestor of all currently living organisms is the last universal ancestor,[3] which lived about 3.9 billion years ago.[5][6] The two earliest pieces of evidence for life on Earth are graphite found to be biogenic in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in western Greenland[7] and microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia.[8][9] All currently living organisms on Earth share a common genetic heritage, though the suggestion of substantial horizontal gene transfer during early evolution has led to questions about the monophyly (single ancestry) of life.[3] 6,331 groups of genes common to all living animals have been identified; these may have arisen from a single common ancestor that lived 650 million years ago in the Precambrian.[10][11]
Universal common descent through an evolutionary process was first proposed by the British naturalist Charles Darwin in the concluding sentence of his 1859 book On the Origin of Species:
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.[12]
^Weiss, Madeline C.; Sousa, Filipa L.; Mrnjavac, Natalia; Neukirchen, Sinje; Roettger, Mayo; Nelson-Sathi, Shijulal; Martin, William F. (2016-07-25). "The physiology and habitat of the last universal common ancestor". Nature Microbiology. 1 (9): 16116. doi:10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.116. ISSN 2058-5276. PMID 27562259. S2CID 2997255.
^Forterre, Patrick; Gribaldo, Simonetta; Brochier, Céline (October 2005). "[Luca: the last universal common ancestor]". Médecine/Sciences. 21 (10): 860–865. doi:10.1051/medsci/20052110860. ISSN 0767-0974. PMID 16197904.
^ abcTheobald, Douglas L. (13 May 2010). "A formal test of the theory of universal common ancestry". Nature. 465 (7295): 219–222. Bibcode:2010Natur.465..219T. doi:10.1038/nature09014. PMID 20463738. S2CID 4422345.
^Steel, Mike; Penny, David (13 May 2010). "Origins of life: Common ancestry put to the test". Nature. 465 (7295): 168–169. Bibcode:2010Natur.465..168S. doi:10.1038/465168a. PMID 20463725. S2CID 205055573.
^Doolittle, W. Ford (February 2000). "Uprooting the Tree of Life" (PDF). Scientific American. 282 (2): 90–95. Bibcode:2000SciAm.282b..90D. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0200-90. PMID 10710791. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-09-07. Retrieved 2015-11-22.
^Glansdorff, Nicolas; Ying Xu; Labedan, Bernard (9 July 2008). "The Last Universal Common Ancestor: emergence, constitution and genetic legacy of an elusive forerunner". Biology Direct. 3: 29. doi:10.1186/1745-6150-3-29. PMC 2478661. PMID 18613974.
^Ohtomo, Yoko; Kakegawa, Takeshi; Ishida, Akizumi; et al. (January 2014). "Evidence for biogenic graphite in early Archaean Isua metasedimentary rocks". Nature Geoscience. 7 (1): 25–28. Bibcode:2014NatGe...7...25O. doi:10.1038/ngeo2025.
^Borenstein, Seth (13 November 2013). "Oldest fossil found: Meet your microbial mom". Yahoo News. Associated Press. Archived from the original on 2019-11-10. Retrieved 2015-11-22.
^Noffke, Nora; Christian, Daniel; Wacey, David; Hazen, Robert M. (16 December 2013). "Microbially Induced Sedimentary Structures Recording an Ancient Ecosystem in the ca. 3.48 Billion-Year-Old Dresser Formation, Pilbara, Western Australia". Astrobiology. 13 (12): 1103–1124. Bibcode:2013AsBio..13.1103N. doi:10.1089/ast.2013.1030. PMC 3870916. PMID 24205812.
^Cite error: The named reference NYT-20180504 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Cite error: The named reference NC-20150430 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
Commondescent is a concept in evolutionary biology applicable when one species is the ancestor of two or more species later in time. According to modern...
Evidence of commondescent of living organisms has been discovered by scientists researching in a variety of disciplines over many decades, demonstrating...
Look up descent in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Descent may refer to: Commondescent, concept in evolutionary biology Kinship, one of the major concepts...
sometimes monogenesis is the theory of human origins which posits a commondescent for all human races. The negation of monogenism is polygenism. This...
patrilineal descent is considered most significant differs from culture to culture. A clan is generally a descent group claiming commondescent from an apical...
limited set of common morphologies, their fossils do not provide information on their ancestry. More recently, evidence for commondescent has come from...
the term for them did not yet exist. He listed a number of them in The Descent of Man, including the muscles of the ear, wisdom teeth, the appendix, the...
demonstrate their commondescent from a known apical ancestor. It is also called the simple unilineal descent. Recent research on the unilineal descent organization...
teach it as fact. Christian fundamentalists reject the evidence of commondescent of humans and other animals as demonstrated in modern paleontology,...
genealogy. The time to the genealogical MRCA (most recent common ancestor by any line of descent) of all living humans cannot be traced genetically because...
current processes, from imperfections in organisms recording historical commondescent, and from transitions in the fossil record. Theories of evolution provide...
Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, last commondescent from Francis Josias, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, further divided into: Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, last commondescent from Francis...
book presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by commondescent through a branching pattern of evolution. Darwin included evidence that...
biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, commondescent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also...
ætt/ätt (pronounced [ˈæːtː] in Old Norse) was a social group based on commondescent, equivalent to a clan. In the absence of a police force, the clan was...
is that humans inherited the muscle through commondescent, and numerous animals that humans share a common ancestor with (such as the orangutan) still...
skeletons of birds and humans. Comparative anatomy has provided evidence of commondescent, and has assisted in the classification of animals. The first specifically...
1809. Charles Darwin more famously proposed the theory of universal commondescent through an evolutionary process in his book On the Origin of Species...
cases, and commondescent in others. The term raptor is derived from the Latin word rapio, meaning "to seize or take by force". The common names for various...
a will. In most contemporary common-law jurisdictions, the law of intestacy is patterned after the common law of descent. Property goes first or in major...
parallel evolution are unclear in practice, so that arbitrary diagnosis is common. When two species share a trait, evolution is defined as parallel if the...
shown that Sarcodina is not a monophyletic group whose members share commondescent. Consequently, amoeboid organisms are no longer classified together...
selection, commondescent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. Evolutionary research is concerned with the origin and descent of species...
categories and living forms as malleable—even suggesting the possibility of commondescent. Serious evolutionary thinking originated with the works of Jean-Baptiste...
Descent 3 (stylized as Descent³) is a first-person shooter video game developed by Outrage Entertainment and published by Interplay Entertainment. It was...
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