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Re: Fw: Most popular/common dinosaur misconceptions

Right, but even in vertebrates there are documented gene transfer events:
Numerous examples of mitochondrial pseudogenes have been documented

This is exactly my point: if you put a mitochondrial gene into the nucleus (in a vertebrate), it does not work. It can be transcribed but not translated. We have copies of, AFAIK, the entire mitochondrial genome in our nuclear genome -- but it consists only of pseudogenes, because as soon as you take a vertebrate mitochondrial gene out of a mitochondrion, it _is_ a pseudogene.

And since plants and amoeba have a mitochondrial genetic code that is
the same as nuclear genetic code, probably the ancestral condition was
that both was the same.

The other way around: the fact that the "universal" code is almost universal, and that all others can easily be derived from it, is evidence that the "universal" code is a synapomorphy of all life -- that life as we know it is, in other words, monophyletic.

Remember that we was talking about lateral gene transfer at *origin*
of the LUCA or cenascestor.

We are talking about lateral gene transfer between organisms that have the same bases in their DNA (already improbable enough) but not the same genetic code because they descend from different origins of life. I have been trying to explain that this cannot work.