
New finding: 600M years ago, a single mutation changed everything - wslh
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/11/startling-new-discovery-600-million-years-ago-a-single-biological-mistake-changed-everything/
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steinsgate
One common objection to the theory of evolution claims that the theory is self
contradictory. It says that it is impossible for complex features such as
wings, eyes etc to evolve because they will require a series of mutations that
do not individually confer any evolutionary advantage. Since they do not have
any evolutionary advantage, they cannot spread in the population. Therefore
the chance of these mutations appearing in series is almost as small as these
mutations appearing simultaneously. The chance of these mutations appearing
simultaneously is, of course, astronomically small.

The usual counterargument says that just one mutation is usually enough to
create a functional prototype of a complex feature/organ (MVP, if you please).
A series of mutations is not required.

This study provides yet another example backing this counterargument. One
single mutation can change an unicellular entity and make it behave like a
multi cellular organism. Intuitively, one would think this would take many
mutations. However, intuition is wrong in this case, and in many others.

~~~
aggie
Even as someone fully accepting of evolutionary theory, this diagram felt like
a revelation:
[http://i58.servimg.com/u/f58/17/30/76/23/evolut10.jpg](http://i58.servimg.com/u/f58/17/30/76/23/evolut10.jpg)

~~~
fiatjaf
The mutation from 4 to 5 is enourmous.

~~~
InclinedPlane
It's not a single step, it's just one sign post on a long highway (you can't
show all of them). Every step along the way is pretty straightforward and
immediately useful.

Eyes are an interesting example, because they are seemingly incredibly complex
systems, yet eyes have evolved independently dozens of times. For example,
octopuses and humans have equivalently complex eyes which have entirely
different origins and have slight differences (for example, human eyes have a
blind spot due to the nerve fibers being on top of instead of behind the light
receptors).

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dnautics
the article over generalizes the find to be basically bereft of real
information.

"Instead of working as enzymes (proteins that facilitate reactions inside the
cell) the proteins were now what’s known as an interaction domain. They could
communicate with and bind to other proteins, a useful skill for cells that
have decided to trade the rugged individualist life for the collaboration of a
group"

Enzymes switch between being enzymes and interaction domians across all taxa
everywhere in the tree of life, so this is not the "money shot". Moreover,
unicellular life do plenty of intracellular, collaborative communication (e.g.
quorum sensing).

Reading the paper, the specific switch enabled the orientation of cell
division to be communicated from one cell to another. This is interesting
because this communication is not over an anisotropic chemical gradient, but
encodes directional and spatial information.

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ajross
This is the closest that article gets to an "explanation":

> _A single mutation that repurposed a certain type of protein. Instead of
> working as enzymes (proteins that facilitate reactions inside the cell) the
> proteins were now what’s known as an interaction domain. They could
> communicate with and bind to other proteins, a useful skill for cells that
> have decided to trade the rugged individualist life for the collaboration of
> a group._

Which is total gibberish. Yet unsurprisingly the abstract to the actual paper
(helpfully linked in the wapo article:
[http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e10147](http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e10147))
is gibberish to me for different reasons.

Is anyone expert enough to attempt a "for technical dummies" reading?

~~~
gjm11
I'll have a go. Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist; corrections welcome.

Consider a growing multicellular organism. It grows by a process of cell
division. Each division turns one cell into two adjacent cells. The structure
it ends up with will depend on the orientation of those dividing cells (you'll
tend to get growth "along the axis of division", so to speak).

A wide variety of multicellular organisms have a mechanism that orients cells
according to features on the outside of neighbouring cells. (It "mediates
spindle orientation in diverse animal taxa by linking microtubule motor
proteins to a marker protein on the cell cortex localized by external cues",
as the abstract puts it. The "mitotic spindle" is a structure involved in cell
division, also called mitosis. It's mostly made out of long thin things called
microtubules, and its job is to separate the chromosomes for the two new
cells, which it does using "motor proteins". The cell cortex is the inner
surface of the boundary of the cell.)

One part of this process is the way in which a protein involved in the mitotic
spindle attaches itself to that thing on the cell cortex. The relevant bit of
that protein is called the "guanylate kinase protein interaction domain" or
GK_PID for short. A protein interaction domain is a bit of protein that
interacts with other things; multiple different proteins can contain instances
of the same interaction domain, just as multiple different programs can
contain (say) the same code for computing SHA-256 checksums.

The paper reports evidence that a single mutation enabled the GK_PID to attach
itself to the marker on the cell cortex. ("The complex was assembled through a
series of molecular exploitation events, one of which – the evolution of
GK_PID’s capacity to bind the cortical marker protein – can be recapitulated
by reintroducing a single historical substitution into the reconstructed
ancestral GK_PID."

So. This doesn't say that multicellularity was enabled by a single mutation.
It says that one small but important part of a process that's necessary for
complex multicellular organisms was enabled by a single mutation. Still pretty
cool, but the journalistic science->hype conversion machine is clearly
operating as usual here.

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tokenadult
As another comment noted, some of the participants in this thread about the
interesting article kindly submitted here appear to be unaware of the factual
basis for evolutionary theory. For anyone who wonders how we know that the
earth is much more than 600 million years old, or how we know that current
living things descended from a common ancestor, more or less remote depending
on how closely related the current living things are, see 29+ Evidences for
Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent,[1] which is a very
informative and interesting website with a lot of information about biological
facts and geological facts that have been discovered since you and I graduated
from high school.

[1]
[http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/](http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/)

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raz32dust
How does it impact the probability of extraterrestrial life? I mean, after 4
billion years of relative peace, Earth still had only single-celled organisms.
And it would have stayed that way, if not for this particular mutation. So it
is not just how many planets can support life. First, it will need to
continuously keep supporting life for billions of years before any form of
intelligent life can emerge. THEN it has to wait till such a pathbreaking
mutation occurs, which might take a random amount of time. I am starting to
gravitate towards the lower bound of what the Drake equation estimates to be
the number of planets with intelligent life. (= we are probably alone in the
universe)

~~~
gus_massa
Don't worry too much about the possibility of multicellular life in other
planets [0]. This press article is totally overhyped.

Read this comment of bmer about the original research article:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10884255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10884255)

[0] [Or to be more precise, IIRC the transition from bacteria to eucariota is
more difficult. I'd worry about that step instead.]

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dschiptsov
Is there another way than a mutation, propagation to an offspring(s), survival
and successful reproduction of these, then over-reproducing others due to this
adaptation (or by a pure chance) etc?

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osoba
I thought multicellularity on Earth evolved independently around 50 times? So
it does kind of make sense that it would be the result of something as simple
as a single SNP that changes a function of a protein from whatever to binding
to proteins of external organisms. Perhaps more complex mechanisms (multiple
mutations) wouldn't have the likelyhood of occuring so many times

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billiam
Obviously important to understand actual modern problems like cancer, but in a
broad sense this is just the beginning of coming to a complete picture of the
origin of metazoa. This was a single mutation that ends up in all animals, but
perhaps other mechanisms were also involved in making the mutation survive and
win.

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dkural
The scientific article makes a far from convincing case for the purported
importance of this mutation. The journal its published in (eLife) is not
exactly known for high-quality comparative genomics / molecular evolution work
either. The Washington Post article is misleading at best. Hyperbole.

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nickbauman
AKA the "Cambrian Explosion". I wasn't aware this was new. I remember this in
HS.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion)

~~~
JeffreyKaine
The Cambrian Explosion has been known for quite some time. This is a theory of
HOW the Cambrian Explosion happened. One single mutation. Interesting ideas
for sure!

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x3n0ph3n3
I find the number of young-earth creationists in disguise here very
surprising.

------
avaku
"In the wild world of pre-complex life, this development was orders of
magnitude better than Twitter for getting organisms organized." Ha ;)

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givan
_insights into life at that time rely on researchers’ imaginations_

Where is this 600M years taken from? big claims based on assumptions, I don't
like this kind of science, building on too many assumptions and you are going
too far from the truth and this is the opposite of what science tries to
achieve.

~~~
zbyte64
Since the researcher was reconstructing the evolution of a protein I would say
the date was determined using a technique called the molecular clock:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock)

That and the rise of multi-cellular life marks the beginning of the Cambrian
explosion (542M years ago). That gives 60M years for the mutation to spread
and specialize.

~~~
stan_rogers
The Cambrian explosion is late in this game; this would be about the emergence
of the Ediacaran biota (largely fractal-like body plans, followed by organisms
with more specialised structural groups and less-local symmetries) and simpler
aggregate colony organisms like sponges, which seemed to come out of nowhere
quickly after the Cryogenian. The Cambrian explosion seems to have been mostly
about riffing on the bilateral symmetry lick.

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once-in-a-while
What? 600M years? Really?

Are you folks aware that 1000 years is already a very long time? Any number
bigger than, say 100.000 years is just the same as infinity, regarding to
time.

This "infinity" problem simply requires too much faith, and will never have
real evidence. Not very good attributes for a credible theory.

Maybe it's about time to get a better one, with less time involved? This way
the faith required would be at a real human reachable level.

~~~
x3n0ph3n3
> Any number bigger than, say 100.000 years is just the same as infinity,
> regarding to time.

Tell that to a geologist or an astrophysicist and you'll be laughed out of the
room. There's plenty of evidence of timescales in the millions and billions of
years.

~~~
once-in-a-while
Exactly the opposite is true: theres is overwhelming evidence that the
Universe (and our solar system) can't be older than just thousands of years.

Often in history majority was wrong. And history is repeating itself,
repeatedly.

~~~
ta0967
_overwhelming evidence that the Universe (and our solar system) can 't be
older than just thousands of years_

i'm _very_ curious about your sources.

