Year: 2022

LATE EVENT. "There is a considerable amount of consilience between the phylogenetic, cell biology, population biology, biochemical and pale-ontological evidence in favour of a scenario in which a merger of just two prokaryotes — one eubacterial and one archaebacterial— formed the eukaryotic cell relatively late in the history of life." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

NO SIMPLE TREE OF LIFE. "The chimeric nature of the eukaryotes has profound implications for our understanding of the nature of life on Earth. It is time to get used to depicting life on this planet as a graph with rings." https://lnkd.in/dz-st9e View in LinkedIn

BOLTED TOGETHER. "Eukaryotes are hybrid organisms in terms of both their cellular organization and their gene complement. All eukaryotes seem to possess mitochondria or related organelles derived from α-proteobacteria, whereas Plantae and many groups of Chromalveolata additionally have cyanobacteria-derived plastids." https://lnkd.in/d_D8bWi View in LinkedIn

HUGE DATA GAP. "There is no fossil record recording the evolution of the eukaryotes." https://lnkd.in/dCVM9yX View in LinkedIn

EUKARYOTES EVOLUTION. "Most hypotheses have been inferred from studying the biology of modern organisms. Eukaryotes may have evolved from prokaryotes because: (1). Both use RNA and DNA are the genetic material; (2). Both use the same 20 amino acids; (3). Both have ribosomes and DNA and RNA; (4). Both have a lipid bilayer cell membrane; (5). Both use L amino acids and D sugars." https://lnkd.in/dCVM9yX View in LinkedIn

HIT BY LIGHTNING. "Eukaryogenesis is widely viewed as an improbable evolutionary transition uniquely affecting the evolution of life on this planet." https://lnkd.in/d6GwkCt View in LinkedIn

WAS IT SINGULAR? "Scientific and popular rhetoric extolling this event as a singularity lacks rigorous evidential and statistical support. Here, we question several of the usual claims about the specialness of eukaryogenesis, focusing on both eukaryogenesis as a process and its outcome, the eukaryotic cell." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

FALSE PREMISE 1. "First, the criteria by which we judge eukaryogenesis to have required a genuinely unlikely series of events 2 billion years in the making are being eroded by discoveries that fill in the gaps of the prokaryote:eukaryote “discontinuity.”." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

FALSE PREMISE 2. "Second, eukaryogenesis confronts evolutionary theory in ways not different from other evolutionary transitions in individuality; parallel systems can be found at several hierarchical levels." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn

FALSE PREMISE 3. "Third, identifying which of several complex cellular features confer on eukaryotes a putative richer evolutionary potential remains an area of speculation: various keys to success have been proposed and rejected over the five-decade history of research in this area." http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/10278.full View in LinkedIn