ORIGIN OF EVOLUTIONARY NOVELTY IN THE PROTEROZOIC EON

Speciation by accumulation of "random DNA mutations" has never been adequately documented in the field, laboratory or fossil record. However many first-rate scientific studies have unequivocally shown symbiogenesis is at the basis of the origin of species and more inclusive higher taxa. Members of at least two prokaryotic subkingdoms (“domains”) a sulfidogenic archaebacterium and a sulfide-oxidizing motile eubacterium) merged in the origin of the first nucleated organisms. They generated the earliest eukaryotes by the Neo-Proterozoic eon (c. 800 million years ago as documented in the fossil record of acritarchs such as Vandalosphaeridium.) Heterotrophic, phagocytotic motile protoctists, I suggest, were ancestral to the late Proterozoic and all Phanerozoic eon eukaryotes (e.g., to other protoctists, animals, fungi and plants). I plan to show our 14 minute film “Eukaryosis” to document details of the origin of nucleated cells by study of extant co-descendants. Thermoplasma (or Sulfolobus-like) archaebacteria and Perfilievia-Spirochaeta-like eubacteria symbiogenetically formed amitochondriate early eukaryotes. LECA, the Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor, evolved well before the Marinoan glaciation c. 650 million years ago. There are no missing links in our sulfur-syntrophy scenario, a saga bolstered by the Canfield-Knoll concept that the late Proterozoic eon still had sulfidic deep oceans. Work on contemporary symbiotic associations make us virtually certain that Boris Michailovich Kozo-Polyansky's (1890-1957) evolutionary analysis was and still is correct (Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, 1924; Harvard University Press, translated by Victor Fet and edited by V. Fet and L. Margulis, 2010).