I am curious about the very first sentences in <a href=../books/Lane.html>Lane’s book</a>.
Why the qualifier “complex” in “All complex life on earth shares a common ancestor ...”?
What sorts of simple ‘life’ might be excluded from Lane’s study?
Crystals are a difficult to exclude from many life definitions and indeed crystals or clays have been proposed as not only the first replicators but even as potential ancestors of RNA life.
I suspect that viruses arose from the same original autocatalytic event that led to us.
The parents of the first virus remain murky however.
<p>“We do know that this common ancestor was already a very complex cell.”
But where did that cell come from?
Perhaps this is a fair claim because the very patterns of ancestor were murky when we were little more than puddles of autocatalytic chemicals, or even with lipid cell walls to protect those puddles.
<p>Aha: Lane seems to exclude bacteria as simple life.
That’s a fair category to study.
We shall consider the eukaryotes.
I find it highly plausible that we had a single eukaryote ancestor—a single particular cell!