Quotes About Multicellular

A neuron didn't know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren't intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren't even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters in choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in Monosiga. I am a colony of microbes talking to itself, Brüks reflected.

An organism is the physical unit associated with one single life cycle. Replicators that gang up in multicellular organisms achieve a regularly recycling life history, and complex adaptations to aid their preservation, as they progress through evolutionary time.

Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades.

The end-Permian or Permo-Triassic extinction was the biggest of the Big Five, an episode that came scarily close to eliminating multicellular life altogether.

If we thus recognise that the aim is to equip the group with the attributes of the individual, we shall be reminded of a valuable remark of Trotter's, to the effect that the tendency towards the formation of groups is biologically a continuation of the multicellular character of all the higher organisms.

Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!

True to Dr. Sauer's words, 1.4 billion years33 after the new eukaryotic refinements had begun, the first really exotic multicellular beings made their debut beneath the sun.34 One recently discovered fossil clam dates to over 720 million B.C.

i am estranged from most men. my american express card says simply: multicellular animal with specialized digestive cavities -- requires corrective glasses

Complex biospheres like the Earth's could be rare because of some bottleneck, some key stage in evolution, that is hard to transit. Perhaps it is the transition to multicellular life. (The fact that simple life on Earth seems to have emerged quite quickly, whereas even the most basic multicellular organisms took nearly three billion years, suggests that there may be severe barriers to the emergence of any complex life.)

Without programmed cell death, the bonds that bind cells in complex multicellular organisms might never have evolved.