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A group of organisms is said to have common descent if they have a common ancestor. In biology, the theory of universal common descent proposes that all organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool.
A theory of universal common descent based on evolutionary principles was proposed by Charles Darwin in his book The Origin of Species (1859), and later in The Descent of Man (1871). This theory is now generally accepted by biologists, and the last universal common ancestor (LUCA or LUA), that is, the most recent common ancestor of all currently living organisms, is believed to have appeared about 3.5 billion years ago (see: origin of life).
The first suggestion that all organisms may have had a common ancestor and diverged through random variation and natural selection was made in 1745 by the French mathematician and scientist Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) in his work Vnus physique. Specifically:
In 1790, Immanuel Kant (Knigsberg (Kaliningrad) 1724 - 1804), in his Kritik der Urtheilskraft, states that the analogy of animal forms implies a common original type and thus a common parent.
In 1795, Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, hypothesized that all warm-blooded animals were descended from a single "living filament":
In 1859, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species was published. The views about common descent expressed therein vary between suggesting that there was a single "first creature" to allowing that there may have been more than one. Here are the relevant quotations from the Conclusion:
The famous closing sentence describes the "grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one." The phrase "one form" here seems to hark back to the phrase "some few beings"; in any case, the choice of words is remarkable for its consistency with recent ideas about there having been a single ancestral "genetic pool".
More recently, scientists such as Francis Crick have postulated that the universal common ancestor could have come from space (panspermia). He was led to this conclusion by the universality of the genetic code (see below).
The universality of the genetic code is generally regarded by biologists as definitive evidence in favor of the theory of universal common descent (UCD) for all bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes (see Three domain system). Analysis of the small differences in the genetic code has also provided support for UCD.The Tree of Life Web Project