Quotes About Multicellularity

Think about multicellularity on this Earth. Every living thing originally came from bacteria. So, who do you think made up the rules for how to perform collective behaviors? It had to be the bacteria.

The dividing eukaryote could not aggressively seek food. Nor could it avoid predatory one-celled creatures whipping through the water in search of someone to eat. The solution: to concentrate spirochetic propellers on the outside of one cell, then to generate an attached cell whose spirochetes could stay inside directing the dance of twining and dividing chromosomes. This, according to Margulis, would start the run-up to another massive leap in the evolution of networks: multicellularity.

These evolutionary achievements were incremental steps toward multicellularity. Colonies of single-celled organisms could be sieved apart, then, if given freedom, were (and still are) able to reconstruct their shattered community.

At the same time, Europe's long-dead postal service was resumed. Now Erasmus could become a snail-mail junkie, using a stream of letters24 to unite a community of international eccentrics into a movement which downgraded religion's death ride to heaven and exalted earthly humanity. The moment was appropriate. For the first time since the rise of multicellularity, there was no longer just one global brain but two—one microbial, the other that of man- and womankind.