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Pre-Darwinian Evolution Before LUCA

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Abstract

If the coming of the last universal cellular ancestor (LUCA) marks the crossing of the “Darwinian Threshold” (Woese in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 99:8742–8747, 2002), pre-LUCA evolution must have been pre-Darwinian. But how did pre-Darwinian evolution actually operate? Bringing together and extending insights from both earlier and more recent contributions, this essay advances three principal arguments regarding the pre-Darwinian evolution. First, in the pre-Darwinian epoch, survival essentially meant persistence within the prebiotic system, and it depended mostly on chemical variation and interaction. Second, selection operated upon four different properties: chemical; chemical-physical; vesicles’ capacities in absorbing, engulfing, and merging; and protocells’ coupling of metabolism, replication, and division. Third, division evolved from a state without tight coupling of replication with division to a state of tight coupling. Eventually, protocells with a tight coupling of replication with division became the First Universal Cellular Ancestors (FUCAs) and then LUCA.

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Notes

  1. For a discussion regarding the exact nature of LUCA, see Cornish-Bowden and Cárdenas (2017).

  2. The “two primary domains” thesis after LUCA is now a near consensus (e.g., Lombard et al. 2012; Koonin 2014a; López-García and Moreira 2015; Williams et al. 2015; Spang et al. 2015; Dacks et al. 2016; Eme et al. 2017).

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Acknowledgements

For insightful comments and suggestions, I thank Bruce Damer, David Deamer, and Eugene Koonin. Jin He, Chang-an Liu, and Yue Tian provided outstanding research assistance.

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  1. School of International Relations and Public Affairs (SIRPA), Fudan University, Shanghai, China

    Shiping Tang

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Tang, S. Pre-Darwinian Evolution Before LUCA. Biol Theory 15, 175–179 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-020-00359-2

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