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?

  • earphone843@sh.itjust.works
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    29 days ago

    No, I said what I meant. There’s no possible way to know with any certainty if life on earth came from a solitary cell, or if multiple single cells formed over the globe without actually traveling through time to find out.

      • earphone843@sh.itjust.works
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        29 days ago

        Because you’d need microscopic physical evidence of something that happened nearly 4 billion years ago. And you’d need a fuck ton of it to definitively say that it was one super cell and not several separate instances of it.

        And on a geological time scale, that evidence has almost certainly been erased.

        We might be able to figure out the conditions that caused life to form, but to know whether it was a singular event or not requires an extremely high burden of proof.