slime mold decisions: another example (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 15, 2020, 11:21 (1381 days ago) @ David Turell

QUOTE: "Slime moulds start out as single cells and can remain in this form all their lives if enough food is available. However, when supplies are scarce, hundreds of thousands of individuals can merge into a single, moving mass in the search for food."

DAVID: amazing evolution from single cells of mold. This story is part of mailed in website to me. Nothing more to see

Thank you for this wonderful example of how evolution works! It started out as single cells which can still remain in the same form but also merged into single bodies of cooperating cells. And once the process of merging had begun, more and more new bodies formed, with variation upon variation as different cells pooled their individual resources. And over thousands of millions of years (we can scarcely conceive that length of time) the cooperating cells produced the vast variety of “single moving masses” that go to make up the history of life on Earth, culminating – we believe – in the most complex of all such masses: H. sapiens and his extraordinary brain.