The Intelligent Design of LUCA

In September 2024, Nature Ecology & Evolution published a major paper reconstructing LUCA by Edmund R. R. Moody, Tom A. Williams, Nick Lane, Ziheng Yang, Davide Pisani, Philip Donoghue, Timothy Lenton, and others. The authors state: “the common ancestry of all extant cellular life is evidenced by the universal genetic code, machinery for protein synthesis, shared chirality of amino acids, and use of ATP. LUCA is then defined as “the node on the tree of life from which the fundamental prokaryotic domains diverge.”

This is circular reasoning — the kind Darwin himself warned against, yet ultimately still used.