The coming of the Last Universal Cellular Ancestor (LUCA) was the singular watershed event in the making of the biotic world. If the coming of LUCA marked the crossing of the “Darwinian Threshold”, then pre-LUCA evolution must have been Pre-Darwinian and at least partly non-Darwinian. But how did Pre-Darwinian evolution before LUCA actually operate? I broaden our understanding of the central mechanism of biological evolution (i.e., variation-selection-inheritance) and then extend this broadened understanding to its natural starting point: the origin(s) of the First Universal Cellular Ancestors (FUCAs) before LUCA. My hypothesis centers upon vesicles’ making-and-remaking as variation and competition as selection. More specifically, I argue that vesicles’ acquisition and merger, via breaking-and-repacking, proto-endocytosis, proto-endosymbiosis, and other similar processes had been a central force of both variation and selection in the pre-Darwinian epoch. These new perspectives shed important new light upon the origin of FUCAs and their subsequent evolution into LUCA.

最后一个通用细胞祖先（LUCA）的到来是生物世界形成过程中的唯一分水岭事件。如果 LUCA 的到来标志着“达尔文门槛”的跨越，那么前 LUCA 的进化一定是前达尔文的，至少部分是非达尔文的。但是，在 LUCA 实际运作之前，前达尔文进化论是如何进行的呢？我拓宽了我们对生物进化中心机制（即变异-选择-遗传）的理解，然后将这种拓宽的理解扩展到其自然起点：LUCA 之前的第一个通用细胞祖先 (FUCA) 的起源。我的假设集中在囊泡的制造和再造作为变异和竞争作为选择。更具体地说，我认为囊泡的获取和合并，通过破坏和重新包装，原内吞作用，原内共生，在前达尔文时代，其他类似的过程一直是变异和选择的核心力量。这些新观点为 FUCA 的起源及其随后向 LUCA 的演变提供了重要的新思路。