A philosopher used to say, beware the man of one book. Today, we might say, be cautious considering the claims of the scientist of one gene.
From New Scientist we hear,:
The leap from single-celled life to multicellular creatures is easier than we ever thought. And it seems there’s more than one way it can happen.
…
At some point after life first emerged, some cells came together to form the first multicellular organism. This happened perhaps as early as 2.1 billion years ago. Others followed – multicellularity is thought to have evolved independently at least 20 times – eventually giving rise to complex life, such as humans.
How about making it easier? complex life such as millipedes?
But no organism is known to have made that transition in the past 200 million years, so how and why it happened is hard to study.
Funny that. Just when we’d be closer to having evidence…
Neither Ratcliff’s yeast nor Herron’s algae has unequivocally crossed the critical threshold to multicellularity, which would require cells to divide labour between them, says Richard Michod of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Actually, even if they did, it’s been done before, for maybe hundreds of millions of years, by the starving amoebas. The trouble is, the amoeba conglomerate always breaks up as soon as they find a food source. They really prefer unicellular life.
‘Tis the gift to be simple?
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