Practice question · True or false
The genetic code is essentially the same in bacteria, plants and animals.
Hints
- What would differing codes imply about the ancestry of these groups?
- A shared code across all domains points to a single common origin.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, the code is near-universal, with only minor variants in mitochondria and a few lineages. That universality is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for common descent, since an arbitrary code would not be shared by chance.
Practise The Origin of Life and the RNA World
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Biology I is free to start.
More questions on The Origin of Life and the RNA World
- Why does the RNA world hypothesis resolve the chicken-and-egg problem of DNA and protein?
- Place these stages of early molecular evolution in the order the RNA world hypothesis proposes.
- A hypothetical genetic code uses 4 bases and codons of length 2. How many distinct codons does it have?
- The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) marks a genealogical bottleneck rather than the inception of…
- Which observations support the idea that RNA preceded DNA and protein?
- Sort each molecule by the role the RNA world hypothesis assigns it in modern cells.