From Elizabeth Pennisi at Science:
The evolutionary histories of some groups of organisms record repeated transitions from single-celled to multicellular forms, suggesting the hurdles could not have been so high. Genetic comparisons between simple multicellular organisms and their single-celled relatives have revealed that much of the molecular equipment needed for cells to band together and coordinate their activities may have been in place well before multicellularity evolved. And clever experiments have shown that in the test tube, single-celled life can evolve the beginnings of multicellularity in just a few hundred generations—an evolutionary instant.
Evolutionary biologists still debate what drove simple aggregates of cells to become more and more complex, leading to the wondrous diversity of life today. But embarking on that road no longer seems so daunting. “We are beginning to get a sense of how it might have occurred,” says Ben Kerr, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “You take what seems to be a major step in evolution and make it a series of minor steps.” More.
So at the basic level, there is a program that adapts single cells to multicellularity? Yes, that certainly makes multicellularity easier and even swifter but it also make traditional Darwinian explanations sound ever more stretched.
See also: The minimal cell: How is research coming on a simple, self-replicating “artificial” cell? Researchers keep discovering new systems in cells. Minimizing or obviating what has not yet been discovered is going to be a challenge…
“Maybe the transition from single cells to multicellular life wasn’t that hard?”
Who said it was hard?
Reductive Materialists, i.e. Darwinists, have no idea how a single cell might achieve its basic form,,,
It is safe to say nobody really knows how an organism achieves its basic form. In the following article, Michael Denton remarks that,’to date the form of no individual cell has been shown to be specified in detail in a genomic blueprint.’
And in the following article entitled ‘how do rod-like bacteria control their geometry?’, in the concluding paragraph, the authors conceded that, ‘We are still far from unravelling the fundamental “engineering” challenges that biology has to overcome in shaping single cells as well as multi-cellular tissues.,,,’
And in the following study, the researchers fully expected to confirm a widely-held belief, backed by strong theoretical predictions,, that (the) shape and motility (of bacteria) had co-evolved. (Yet, the researchers remarked,) to our great surprise we didn’t find any association between the two traits.”
In short, molecular biologists don’t even understand how a single cell might achieve its basic form, much less do they understand how a multicellular organism might achieve its basic form.
This failure of Darwinian evolution, particularly the failure of the reductive materialism on which Darwinian evolution is based, to be able to explain the basic form of any particular organism occurs at a very low level. Much lower than DNA itself.
In the following article entitled ‘Quantum physics problem proved unsolvable’, which studied the derivation of macroscopic properties from a complete microscopic description, the researchers remark that even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,, The researchers further commented that their findings challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
Darwinists hold that the basic form of an organism is achieved by mutations to DNA.
Yet, as Jonathan Wells states in the following article, Studies using saturation mutagenesis in the embryos of fruit flies, roundworms, zebrafish and mice also provide evidence against the idea that DNA specifies the basic form of an organism. Biologists can mutate (and indeed have mutated) a fruit fly embryo in every possible way, and they have invariably observed only three possible outcomes: a normal fruit fly, a defective fruit fly, or a dead fruit fly.
Moreover, to further drive the point home that the sequences in DNA cannot explain how any particular kind of organism achieves its basic form, in the following article Dr. Jonathan Wells states, “I now know as an embryologist,,,Tissues and cells, as they differentiate, modify their DNA to suit their needs. It’s the organism controlling the DNA, not the DNA controlling the organism.”
James Shapiro weighs in here and states, ‘Research dating back to the 1930s has shown that genetic change is the result of cell-mediated processes, not simply accidents or damage to the DNA. This cell-active view of genome change applies to all scales of DNA sequence variation, from point mutations to large-scale genome rearrangements and whole genome duplications (WGDs).’
And here is a particularly crystal clear example of the ‘organism controlling the DNA, and not the DNA controlling the organism’, as is presupposed in Darwinian thinking. Specifically, a bacterium, ‘after shattering of its 3.2 Mb genome into 20–30 kb pieces,,, miraculously reassembles its genome such that only 3 hr later fully reconstituted nonrearranged chromosomes are present, and the cells carry on, alive as normal.,,,’
Moreover, in the following study, researchers implanted human embryonic neuronal cells into a mouse embryo.,,, Yet, the human neurons, despite having human DNA, had a mouse morphology. If DNA really ruled morphology, we would have expected a human morphology.
The following article notes that ‘a brief time-lapse video can teach more about embryonic development than any amount of reading. And further notes that it is hard not to be impressed how a repeatable form reliably emerges despite considerable variation in both genes and environment.’
Many more evidences falsifying the belief that reductive materialistic, i.e. Darwinian, explanations can explain how any particular organism might achieve its basic form are gone over in the following video:
In short, since Darwinian explanations cannot even explain how a single cell might achieve its basic form, much less explain how a multicellular creature might achieve its basic form, then Darwinian speculations as to how a single cell creature might transform into a multicellular creature are based on pure imagination and have no real experimental basis in reality.
Verse:
It’s not hard if it never actually happened.
And hard for who?
Andrew
“may have been in place well before ”
I wonder how many times we’ll have to hear this phrase before it stops being an inexplicable SURPRISE to the researchers? My guess is several billion.
Better question: How did the species Scientistus academicus evolve without inductive reasoning, without an ability to draw conclusions from facts?
Why does a drive for change exist at all, if it even does exist?
Emergent property of The Universe?
How much are these bozos getting paid?
Andrew
This suggests pre-planning, preadaptation or some kind of genetic pre-programming. In other words, a guided, directed, teleological form of evolution. That’s not exactly what Darwin had in mind.
You can’t salvage Darwinian evolution by arbitrarily smuggling in teleology where ever and whenever you need it. “Pre-adaptation” is evidence of intelligent design.
aarceng,
That’s correct.
asauber,
Exactly. Good question.
polistra:
“How did the species Scientistus academicus evolve without inductive reasoning, without an ability to draw conclusions from facts?”
In the case of the modern synthesis Darwinist species, did you mean “devolve” ?
Their ancestors Copernicus and Kepler possessed those important attributes their descendants miss now.
How did that tremendous loss happen?
john_a_designer,
What is “the molecular equipment needed for cells to band together and coordinate their activities“?
What does that include?
How did they get that?
PeterA,
Choanoflagellates are protozoa which for some reason have signaling proteins that are necessary in higher multicellular animals including human beings.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080701165050.htm
The point I was trying to make above is: what is the Darwinian explanation for a single celled organism evolving a function that they do not need? From an ID perspective, on the other hand, this looks like a case of pre-planning or pre-adaptation. NS + RV is non-teleological it cannot anticipate or look ahead. Darwinism has to rely on lucky accidents that somehow happened millions of years in the past. How do you prove that these lucky accidents (and there has to be a long series of them) ever occurred?
Several ID’ists, like Behe and Denton, accept common descent, which means they see design “front loaded” into evolution. Preadaptation would fit nicely into that sort of paradigm.
john_a_designer,
Interesting explanation. Thanks.
asauber and Peter A, I find it difficult, to say the least, to argue with A/Mats, in a non-ironical manner, in view of their apparent ignorance of the primacy of first principles, which, surely, also by definition, are seminal.
a) How can anyone – I believe infants have more sense – not see that nothing could not produce anything, never mind, everything ;
b) How can anyone believe that complex designs in nature (than which there are not, nor surely could be, any designs as complex, made by man – even given the raw materials) came about and indeed grow and develop by random chance !
15 Axel
“a) How can anyone – I believe infants have more sense – not see that nothing could not produce anything, never mind, everything ;”
So nothing doing?