Year: 2022

COMPLEXITY SALTATIONS. "Each such transition is typically viewed as marking a drastic jump in complexity: cells are much more complex than any of their individual constituents (i.e. genes or proteins), eukaryotes are more complex than prokaryotes, multicellular more complex than unicellular organisms, and human societies more complex than individuals." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION CHANGES. "Szathmáry and Maynard Smith have suggested that all major evolutionary transitions involve changes in the way information is stored and transmitted." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

EXPONENTIAL INCREASE IN INFORMATION. "An example is the origin of epigenetic regulation, whereby heritable states of gene activation lead to a potentially exponential increase in the amount of information that may be transmitted from generation to generation (since a set of N genes, existing in two states - on or off - via epigenetic rearrangements, can have 2N distinct states)." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

INFORMATION IS SELECTIVE ADVANTAGE. "Such a vast jump in the potential information content of single cells is believed to have led to a dramatic selective advantage in unicellular populations capable of epigenetic regulation and inheritance." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

DIVERSIFIED OPTIONS. "The reasoning is straightforward: epigenetic factors permit a single cell line with a given genotype to express many different phenotypes on which natural selection might act, thereby providing a competitive advantage through diversification." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

MANY FROM THE FEW. "Importantly, this innovation was crucial to the later emergence of multicellularity by permitting differentiation of many cell types from a single genomic inventory." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT. "Although epigenetic regulation was likely a necessary precondition for the emergence of multicellular organization (at least in extant lineages), it does not necessitate that such a transition from unicellularity to multicellularity will occur or explain how it occurs." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

HARD TO ANSWER. "Plenty of protists are capable of phenotypic differentiation but have never made the transition to true multicellularity, although they may exhibit highly collective and coordinated behaviors." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

MISSING PARTS. "More generally, while it is true that changes in how information is stored and transmitted enable the possibility of new levels of organization to evolve, such innovations are not necessarily a sufficient causative agent to drive the emergence of genuinely new, higher-level, entities." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn

TRANSITIONS DRIVEN BY INFORMATION. "We propose that these major transitions, corresponding to major jumps in biological complexity, are associated with information gaining causal efficacy over higher levels of organization." https://lnkd.in/dTS7dFy View in LinkedIn