Cells divide and make new cells, is all life on Earth rooted in one super ancestor cell? Or are there parallel paths to cell creation?

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    3 days ago

    No, at least not in the way religious people might want you to think. There were likely multiple single-celled organisms that became the early ancestors to the various life on Earth.

    So in that way, we all have a common ancestor, but it probably wasn’t one cell in particular, just like all apes (including humans) and all modern monkeys didn’t come from one single old-world monkey.

    The reason this is plausible is because convergent evolution has been observed countless times throughout nature. Bats have wings, insects have wings, birds have wings; fish have scales, snakes have scales, pangolins have scales. And so, a single cell from way back when only needs to have been able to survive, not necessarily have all the exact same adaptations as other cells. As they mixed and shared DNA and split, some of them would have coalesced into our early ancestors, some would have become ancestors of plants, some would have become ancestors for fungi, etc.