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The eukaryote, the first cell to get organized (quantamagazine.org)
69 points by elsewhen 15 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments



A brief synopsis of eukaryotic life from my book, showing where complex life fits into our timeline:

https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf#page=12


Wow, good one, I loved the illustrations too. What a portentous, foreboding prediction of humanity


> The eukaryotes invented organization, if we use the literal definition of “organize”: to be furnished with organs

I write about organisations, and I had never considered that! I wonder if that fits with the historical bias towards functional organisation. (And functionalism in sociology, but I undestand that to be discredited now)


The first cell with a surviving lineage to get organised. There could have been countless other 'attempts' that, for one reason or another, failed to get established, or died out before they could leave a trace in the fossil record.


"At some point, in a sequel to mitochondrial capture, a eukaryote engulfed a cyanobacterium capable of photosynthesis... green organelles called chloroplasts, evolved into plants and other photosynthesizers."

Chloroplasts are only one type of plastid; this process occurred far more than once.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastid


So did multi-celled life evolve several times independently among the original eukaryotes if some gained chloroplasts or mitochondria before being multi-cellular?


First we gained mithocondria and later we split in several branches.

Some of the branches gained chloroplast. (IIRC there are three versions.)

And some members of the branches got multicelular.

A more technical and accurate version from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism

> However, complex multicellular organisms evolved only in six eukaryotic groups: animals, symbiomycotan fungi, brown algae, red algae, green algae, and land plants. It evolved repeatedly for Chloroplastida (green algae and land plants), once for animals, once for brown algae, three times in the fungi (chytrids, ascomycetes, and basidiomycetes) and perhaps several times for slime molds and red algae.


Yes! It evolved at least 25 times (that we know of). Animals, plants, algae, fungi, etc. all invented multicellularity independently and in many of those groups did so multiple times.


Yesterday an article was trending "The Secret Electrostatic World of Insects". Now I wonder, how much does static electricity actually affect cells? https://www.wired.com/story/the-secret-electrostatic-world-o...


Cells are predominately electrical in nature. Our sense of physical being is an emergent effect of electromagnetic repulsion at the atomic level. The smaller you get, the less sense it makes to model things as solid and the more sense to model things as charge fields. Modeling proteins and molecules is largely about modeling their electric field.

Quantum mechanics get outsized attention as the “small scale” world. The electrical exists just above it in size, but is much more relevant to how we perceive reality.


Trading complexity for statistic dice throws aka copies.


Much like the evolution of programming practices in the age of LLMs.


What? Cells of organized labor?

Next thing, they'll start talking about unions!


You made me laugh out loud. Thank you.


We can not have cancer within the cancer that is within the original structure giving cancer that is the state. Thats meta-meta-meta-stasis




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