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gwern comments on Open thread, Oct. 03 - Oct. 09, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: MrMind 03 October 2016 06:59AM

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Comment author: gwern 05 October 2016 09:19:10PM *  5 points [-]

Lots of other problems with it too. Why is there any last-universal-common-ancestor in this scenario? You would want to drop a full ecosystem with millions of different organisms, each with different FEC shards of data. If you can deliver some bacteria to a virgin planet, you can deliver multiple kinds of bacteria, not just one. Yet, genetics finds that there's a LUCA (not that much of LUCA survives in current genomes).