Was the universal common ancestry proved?

Takahiro Yonezawa () and Masami Hasegawa ()
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Takahiro Yonezawa: School of Life Sciences, Fudan University
Masami Hasegawa: School of Life Sciences, Fudan University

Nature, 2010, vol. 468, issue 7326, E9-E9

Abstract: Abstract Arising from D. L. Theobald Nature 465, 219–222 (2010)10.1038/nature09014 ; Theobald reply The question of whether or not all life on Earth shares a single common ancestor has been a central problem of evolutionary biology since Darwin1. Although the theory of universal common ancestry (UCA) has gathered a compelling list of circumstantial evidence, as given in ref. 2, there has been no attempt to test statistically the UCA hypothesis among the three domains of life (eubacteria, archaebacteria and eukaryotes) by using molecular sequences. Theobald2 recently challenged this problem with a formal statistical test, and concluded that the UCA hypothesis holds. Although his attempt is the first step towards establishing the UCA theory with a solid statistical basis, we think that the test of Theobald2 is not sufficient enough to reject the alternative hypothesis of the separate origins of life, despite the Akaike information criterion (AIC) of model selection3 giving a clear distinction between the competing hypotheses.

Date: 2010
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DOI: 10.1038/nature09482

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