> discovered in a group of primordial precursor life forms so therefore that's when it originated. It's a shorthand way of working with incomplete information.

> discovered in a group of primordial precursor life forms so therefore that's when it originated. It's a shorthand way of working with incomplete information. In many cases it's not possible to directly point to a concrete organism as a point of origin for a certain molecule. That's why we point to the earliest known implementation and shrug. > Just to be contrary, is it not at all possible that such and such a feature "evolved" in all the relevant life forms at the same (more recent) time in response to changing external stimuli? When a molecule is sufficiently complex and all other factors being equal, we tend to assume there was one common ancestor who first developed it. It seems to me that Quanta is sometimes a bit biased towards the cosmic inevitability of intelligence, while carefully avoiding full-on Penrose mysticism. That's why the title is phrased as it is when in fact this discovery is congruous with current models. Signal proteins evolving before the majority of systems they're currently used in is in fact well aligned with prior expectations. Once a way to synthesize a molecule has evolved, it can get re-used quite a lot for similar purposes. That's because evolution is a hill-climbing algorithm which is bad at coming up with complexity from the ground up but has no problem with complexity that has developed over extended periods. > humans are not more "evolved" than single-celled organisms Well, there is a directionality to evolution, and humans are way more complex than single-celled organisms. Biologists tend to avoid labels such as "more evolved" because they can be misleading and because obviously every organism around today is evolved to the same extent, namely to survive in current conditions.