Final answer:
Carl Woese hypothesized that gene sequences could illuminate evolutionary relationships among organisms, which led to the revolutionary concept of separating prokaryotes into two domains: Bacteria and Archaea.
Step-by-step explanation:
The scientist who first hypothesized that gene sequences could provide new insights into evolutionary relationships among all organisms, including microbes, is Carl Woese. His work significantly impacted our understanding of the evolutionary tree by introducing the use of genetic relationships to define a new systematic category known as domains, one of which includes the Archaea.
Woese's revolutionary approach was groundbreaking because it highlighted the vast genetic variability in prokaryotes, which justified the separation of these organisms into two domains: Bacteria and Archaea. He made this discovery in the 1970s by analyzing the gene sequences coding for small subunit ribosomal RNA (rRNA), demonstrating that there was a need to construct a new phylogenetic tree to represent life's true diversity.
The scientist who first hypothesized that gene sequences could provide new insights into evolutionary relationships among all organisms (including microbes) was Woese. Woese constructed a tree of life based on comparative gene sequencing that is universally distributed, present in every organism, and conserved. By comparing homologous DNA and RNA sequences, Woese revealed the extensive variability of prokaryotes and justified the separation of prokaryotes into two domains: bacteria and archaea.