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Pro-Active Adventure
Outdoor Education Centre in Llangollen, North Wales, School Residential, adventure activity
History
Common ancestor
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 Venus physique. Specifically:
Evidence of universal common descent
Common biochemistry and genetic code
All known forms of life are based on the same fundamental biochemical organization: genetic information encoded in DNA, transcribed into RNA, through the effect of protein- and RNA-enzymes, then translated into proteins by (highly similar) ribosomes.]
Examples of common descent
Artificial selection
Artificial selection offers remarkable examples of the amount of diversity that can exist between individuals sharing a late common ancestor. To perform artificial selection, one begins with a particular species.
