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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. [1] [2] [3] [4]
A clade is by definition monophyletic, meaning that it contains one ancestor which can be an organism, a population, or a species and all its descendants. [ note 1 ] [ 10 ] [ 11 ] The ancestor can be known or unknown; any and all members of a clade can be extant or extinct.
Infinite descent, a method going back to Fermat to solve Diophantine equations; Descent (mathematics), an idea extending the notion of "gluing" in topology Hadamard's method of descent, a technique for solving partial differential equations
[4] [5] Charles Darwin more famously proposed the theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process in his book On the Origin of Species in 1859: "Therefore I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first ...
A deeper understanding of developmental biology shows that common morphology is, in fact, the product of shared genetic elements. [5] For example, although camera-like eyes are believed to have evolved independently on many separate occasions, [ 6 ] they share a common set of light-sensing proteins ( opsins ), suggesting a common point of ...
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth.
A most recent common ancestor (MRCA), also known as a last common ancestor (LCA), is the most recent individual from which all organisms of a set are descended. The term is also used in reference to the ancestry of groups of genes rather than organisms.
A rooted tree of life into three ancient monophyletic lineages: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes based on rRNA genes Lineages are typically visualized as subsets of a phylogenetic tree.