Early embryology; making a formed body (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 06, 2016, 10:28 (2910 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID’S comment: Logically multicellularity develops from single cells. If those single cells were originally basically automatic in their responses to stimuli, it is easy to imagine how they agglomerated into multicellular with full cooperative behavior. If they were accustomed to act independently, necessarily they had to give up that independence to join in a multiple cell, multiple organ animal. To me it seems like multicellularity occurred more easily if the original joining cells were automatic.

I don’t know why you find it easy to imagine cells originally agglomerating and cooperating automatically. Why would they bother if they were functioning independently? Of course they had to give up their independence in what I have called the quest for improvement. That is the very essence of Margulis’s argument that cooperation is a crucial driving force in evolution – and she believed in cellular intelligence. It may seem to you that multicellularity occurred more easily if it was automatic, because you are convinced that your God organized it. But it would have occurred just as easily if your God had given cells the intelligence to work out new forms of life to cope with or exploit an ever changing environment.