From Newsgroup: talk.origins


https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02635-2

For some three billion years, unicellular
organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion
years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early
attempts at team living began to stick, paving the
way for the evolution of complex organisms,
including animals, plants and fungi.

Across all known life, the move to
multicellularity happened at least 40 times,
suggests one study. But, in animals, it seems
to have occurred only once.

Beginning in the early 2000s, researchers
interested in this remarkable event made a
series of unexpected discoveries. The prevailing
view held that a flood of genes had to evolve to
enable the key properties of multicellularity:
the ability of cells to stick together,
communication using molecular signals and the
coordinated regulation of gene expression that
causes each cell to specialize and take its
position in the organism. But studies found that
some unicellular organisms express a slew of
proteins that control key properties of
multicellularity in animals. The molecular
toolkit required for multicellularity seems to
have existed well before the first animals came
to be.
...

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From Newsgroup: talk.origins

On 8/27/2025 11:59 PM, Pro Plyd wrote:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02635-2

For some three billion years, unicellular
organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion
years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early
attempts at team living began to stick, paving the
way for the evolution of complex organisms,
including animals, plants and fungi.

Across all known life, the move to
multicellularity happened at least 40 times,
suggests one study. But, in animals, it seems
to have occurred only once.

Beginning in the early 2000s, researchers
interested in this remarkable event made a
series of unexpected discoveries. The prevailing
view held that a flood of genes had to evolve to
enable the key properties of multicellularity:
the ability of cells to stick together,
communication using molecular signals and the
coordinated regulation of gene expression that
causes each cell to specialize and take its
position in the organism. But studies found that
some unicellular organisms express a slew of
proteins that control key properties of
multicellularity in animals. The molecular
toolkit required for multicellularity seems to
have existed well before the first animals came
to be.
...

This seems to be a review of the subject until 2023. I do not know why
this article took so long to be published. The claim is that it is an
active and growing field of study, but no recent publications are cited.
Normally news articles like this are published soon after the main
paper that they are talking about, but that paper was published in 2023.
Maybe the article just forgot to cite the current publication that the article is about.

I think that in their figure phylogeny including choanoflagellates that Porifera (sponges) would be on the Metazoan branch as the most basal multicellular type of animal.

Ron Okimoto

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