Lucky LUCA: Evolutionists Hide Gaps Behind Phrases

Here we see researchers viewing reality
through evolutionary glasses, leading to bold
interpolations beyond the actual evidence

 

The First Human Was Fully Human
and the First Cell Was a Fully Functional Cell

by Jerry Bergman, PhD

A long-time interest of mine has been how the fossil record is used by evolutionists in their attempt to document evolution. Again and again, I have noticed that when an organism first appears in the fossil record, it already appears as a fully recognizable member of its group. For example, the earliest known horseshoe crab fossils are clearly horseshoe crabs. They are morphologically very similar to modern horseshoe crabs.

The Living Fossil Problem

The same pattern appears in every other life-form I have examined.[1] Organisms like this are often referred to as “living fossils.” Technically, a living fossil is an extant organism that bears a striking resemblance to its ancient fossilized ancestors and appears to have undergone relatively little morphological change over vast periods of time. Common examples include:

• Insects such as cockroaches
• Mollusks such as the nautilus
• Arthropods such as the horseshoe crab
• Fish such as the coelacanth and goblin shark
• Reptiles such as the tuatara
• Mammals such as the platypus

Since evolutionary theory is the dominant paradigm in biology, and because gradual change over time is a central expectation of the theory, the apparent lack of significant morphological change in many lineages—commonly termed the ‘living fossil problem’—for evolution to be true, living fossils must be reconciled within that framework.

Evolutionary accounts for the horseshoe crab often claim it must have been evolving undetected for hundreds of millions of years before the oldest horseshoe crab fossils appeared in the fossil record around 250 million years ago. Remarkably, this alleged 300 million-year evolutionary prelude left no trace in the fossil record. Proponents routinely offer the same excuse for the absence of transitional evidence across all major life forms.

One explanation/ad hoc proposal given for the horseshoe crab’s missing fossil record over its first 300 million years is that primitive horseshoe crabs failed to fossilize until they evolved a hard, preservable shell. This paper scrutinizes such explanations and their adequacy in addressing the pervasive stasis observed in so-called living fossils.

Was LUCA Real?

A long-standing goal of evolutionists has been to trace the fossil record back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), the hypothesized progenitor of all modern life. Since the “concept of LUCA first emerged, it has represented the ultimate horizon of our biological history. It is the oldest organism whose existence we can prove using standard evolutionary family trees.”[2]

Oberlin College Professor of biology Aaron D. Goldman et al. attempted to document LUCA by locating what appear to be  “ancient genes” to study life that is thought to have existed before all living organisms shared a common ancestor.[3] These genes, the researchers believe, may reveal how early cells were able to function before modern life. The Oberlin College scientists asserted that they have effectively done just that—rewinding the tape of life

back past the dinosaurs, past the explosion of animal life in the Cambrian, past the first multicellular blobs, all the way back to a single, microscopic speck floating in a primordial ocean about four billion years ago. …When researchers reconstruct LUCA’s genome using sophisticated bioinformatics and molecular phylogenetics, they don’t find a primitive, half-formed stutter of life. They find a fully functioning cellular machine. It had a complex metabolism, a genetic code written in DNA, and protein-building factories called ribosomes.[4] [Bold added.]

Hiding the Evidence in the Unobservable Past

Evolutionists attempt to resolve the LUCA problem much like they do with the horseshoe crab stasis problem: by pushing the real evolutionary action further back into an unobservable past. “If LUCA was already a sophisticated cell,” the Oberlin scientists states, “then the real story of life’s origins — the messy, trial-and-error period where inanimate chemistry became biology — happened long before LUCA arrived.”[5] Once again, the foundational transitions remain hidden from scrutiny.

The issue is that a truly viable, functioning cell demands ‘a complex metabolism, a genetic code written in DNA, and protein-building factories called ribosomes.’ Absent these interlocking systems, what remains is merely a haphazard assortment of chemicals—incapable of coordinated function, self-replication, or evolutionary change.

Goldman et al. then applied phylogenetic analysis in an attempt to characterize the LUCA, asserting that “Phylogenetic analysis is a powerful method in the study of early evolution because it uses molecular evidence that has been inherited from the ancient organisms themselves.”[6]

Goldman stressed that a key part of this effort involves studying ‘universal paralog proteins’. A paralog is a group of similar genes that appear multiple times within a single genome.[7] Universal paralogs are rarer: “gene families that appear in at least two copies in the genomes of nearly all living organisms. Their widespread presence suggests that the original gene duplication occurred before the last universal common ancestor emerged. Those duplicated genes were then passed down through countless generations and remain present in life today.”[8]

There is a problem, however, with this explanation. These gene families appear in the genomes of “nearly all living organisms’ not because they evolved very early in evolutionary history, but because they are critically important genes.

Ubiquitous Because They Are Indispensable

As Goldman et al. admits, “Every one of these genes plays a role in either building proteins or moving molecules across cell membranes.”[9] These core cellular functions are indispensable for life itself, so their presence in every domain doesn’t prove ultra-early origins; it simply shows they’ve been widely used because of their importance and effectiveness in the cell.

Goldman et al. claim that these universal paralog genes “provide an indispensable tool for pushing our understanding of early evolutionary history even further back in time, thereby describing the foundational processes that shaped life as we know it today.”[10] Strikingly, their article mentioned evolution no fewer than 83 times (counting references), yet they acknowledge inherent problems with the method itself for reliably documenting LUCA:

The phylogenetic study of ancient life is constrained by several fundamental limitations. Both gene loss across multiple lineages and low levels of conservation in some gene families can obscure the ancient origin of those gene families. Furthermore, in the absence of an extensive diagnostic fossil record, the dependence of molecular phylogenetics on conserved gene sequences means that periods of evolution that predated the emergence of the genetic system cannot be studied.[11]

As discussed above, the optimistic comments on this research by Goldman et al. quoted below are, at best, problematic.

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these rare genes, researchers can investigate how early cells worked and what features of life emerged first. New computational tools are now helping scientists unlock this hidden chapter of evolution.[12]

Constructing a House of Cards by Piling on Assumptions

Here we see yet another case of researchers viewing reality through evolutionary glasses, leading to bold interpolations well beyond the actual evidence. The researchers spotlight certain genes with pivotal roles in the cell—building proteins or shuttling molecules across cell membranes—that appear in a staggering diversity of organisms, including mollusks, insects, reptiles, birds, and mammals. They leap to the conclusion that they must have existed very early in the history of life, predating the hypothetical Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). Then, they imagine, those genes must have been faithfully passed down to today’s life forms.

This is a classic house of cards. One assumption has been piled upon another. They are correct in noting that the cells existing very early in life’s history were also “Living Fossils,” very similar to the cells existing today. But when the evolutionary glasses are removed, the observable evidence supports not evolution, but rather creation.

References

[1] Bergman, J., Fossil Forensics: Separating Fact from Fantasy in Paleontology, Bartlett Publishing, (BP Learning, info@bplearning.net), 2017.

[2] Puiu, Tibi, “Scientists Find Genes That Are Actually Older Than the Ancestor of All Living Things. Universal paralogs are helping scientists rewrite the history of early life on Earth,” ZME Science, https://www.zmescience.com/science/biology/scientists-find-genes-that-are-actually-older-than-the-ancestor-of-all-living-things/, 10 February 2026.

[3] Oberlin College, “Scientists find genes that existed before all life on Earth,” Science Daily, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260210082913.htm, 10 February 2026. The scientist in the Oberlin study included one from MIT.

[4] Puiu, 2026.

[5] Puiu, 2026.

[6] Goldman, A., et al., “Universal paralogs provide a window into evolution before the last universal common ancestor,” Cell Genomics https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xgen.2026.101140, 5 February 2026.

[7] Oberlin College, 2026.

[8] Goldman, et al., 2026.

[9] Oberlin College, 2026.

[10] Goldman, , et al., 2026.

[11] Goldman, Et al., 2026, p. 6.

[12] Oberlin College, 2026.

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Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,900 publications in 14 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,800 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 60 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.