Data from: Testing for universal common ancestry

A phylogenetic model selection test to quantify the evidence for the
Universal Common Ancestry (UCA) of life forms was proposed recently
(Theobald 2010a), based on the comparison of the statistical support,
using likelihoods, the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), or Bayes
factors, for two different phylogenetic models representing the UCA and
the independent origins (IOs) hypotheses (Sober and Steel 2002). In this
test, the former is represented by a single phylogeny connecting all
sequences, whereas the latter is depicted by several, independent
phylogenetic trees (Fig. 1). Importantly, in the original UCA test, the
same alignment was used to represent both hypotheses. When applied to a
particular data set of 23 universally conserved proteins, the test
strongly favored a UCA scenario.