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Common descent is a concept in evolutionary biology applicable when one species is the ancestor of two or more species later in time. According to modern evolutionary biology, all living beings could be descendants of a unique ancestor commonly referred to as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all life on Earth.
For example, there are well over 350,000 described species of beetles. [216] Examples of speciation come from the observations of island biogeography and the process of adaptive radiation, both explained previously. Evidence of common descent can also be found through paleontological studies of speciation within geologic strata.
Many commonly named groups – rodents and insects, for example – are clades because, in each case, the group consists of a common ancestor with all its descendant branches. Rodents, for example, are a branch of mammals that split off after the end of the period when the clade Dinosauria stopped being the dominant terrestrial vertebrates 66 ...
For example, a person is considered to be a priest or Levite, if his father is a priest or Levite, and the members of all the Twelve Tribes are called Israelites because their father is Israel . In the first lines of the New Testament , the descent of Jesus Christ from King David is counted through the male lineage.
The term paraphyly, or paraphyletic, derives from the two Ancient Greek words παρά (pará), meaning "beside, near", and φῦλον (phûlon), meaning "genus, species", [2] [3] and refers to the situation in which one or several monophyletic subgroups of organisms (e.g., genera, species) are left apart from all other descendants of a unique common ancestor.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 7 November 2024. Person from whom another person is descended For other uses, see Ancestor (disambiguation). "Ancestry", "Forefather", and "Ancestress" redirect here. For the genealogy company, see Ancestry.com. For the band, see Forefather (band). For the song, see Ancestress (song). This article needs ...
For example, the human eye uses four genes to make structures that sense light: three for colour vision and one for night vision; all four are descended from a single ancestral gene. [35] New genes can be generated from an ancestral gene when a duplicate copy mutates and acquires a new function.
Well-studied examples include Darwin's finches, a group of 13 finch species endemic to the Galápagos Islands, and the Hawaiian honeycreepers, a group of birds that once, before extinctions caused by humans, numbered 60 species filling diverse ecological roles, all descended from a single finch like ancestor that arrived on the Hawaiian Islands ...