Three domains

Back to this question of why we care about the Last Common Ancestor:

  • We now know that there is much greater metabolic diversity than we suspected 20 years ago.
  • We now know that life can live in, survive, and thrive in much more extreme environments than was previously thought.
  • Almost all of the extremophiles are more closely related to each other than to us.
  • The last common ancestor was likely a thermophile.

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