Natures wonders: Subsea Microorganisms Long Life (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, August 27, 2018, 05:18 (2279 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: Further, now you are not simply suggesting that microbes in a SINGLE organism create internal changes, but that they somehow communicate those changes to others of their kind WITHOUT reproduction (because speciation makes them incompatible).

DAVID: Horizontal gene transfer allows for modifications of attributes, but not new species. Tony makes a good point.

DHW: Tony was talking about single organisms communicating changes to others of their kind. I am pointing out that communities subjected to the same environmental conditions will make the same changes. Multiple pre-whales, male and female, would have entered the water, and so multiple pre-whales would have developed fins from legs – not just one passing its genes onto its neighbours. But nobody knows how speciation took place. Horizontal gene transfer may well have been an important factor.

Tony: And what DHW is suggesting is so miraculous that he might as well be saying 'God did it'. How did the creatures survive long enough to determine what physiological and biochemical changes would be needed, and then how did they communicate that to the entire species? I mean, think of how much knowledge and information exchange (between members of the soon to be altered species) you are talking about, or the likelihood that they would ALL arrive at the same solution without communication.

David: Those that don't get the message remain the old species, I assume. Cells communicate automatically at the multicellular level, and that must be true or the organism would not live. The single cell is an all in one and must do everything. Communication is limited to quorum sensing and gene transfer, and I consider it almost all very automatic as a series of molecular reactions.

Tony: To cells within a single organism, that is possible, however unlikely, but look at the rest of the question. How did one multi-cellular organism and another multi-cellular organism, or the cells inside them, all come to the SAME conclusion at the SAME time. It takes more than one multi-cellular organism to reproduce, in almost all cases.

How does a single mutation in one individual get spread into the group? Chance meeting for reproduction takes too long for the times involved in the record, and species appear only after huge gaps in phenotype.