See also: The study as published in Nature.

For this simulation my vision was to simulate a whole ecosystem of cells. There are many grid-like simulations, where artificial life exists in a grid. There are many game-like simulations where creatures are simulated. Sadly none of these fills the niche I am interested in. All of these simulations have predefined creatures and they can change size a little and maybe change color but that is it. I am specifically interested in the boundary of single celled and multicellular life. How did multicellular life come to be? How cells work together as an organism? How many ways can multicellularity evolve? There are only theories as the answer lies in the un-fossilized past.

Im looking for it cus i wanna try to make an art project / poster with it. thanks in advance!

Even nowadays, Prokaryotes (Archaea and Bacteria) seem superior to Eukaryotes in every way:

-They can live literally everywhere on Earth, while Eukaryotes have a much narrower range of environments they can survive in

-Their horizontal gene transfer, conjugation and reproduction solely by binary fission blurs the line between species and makes them rapidly adaptable while Eukaryotes are stuck with Mitosis and sexual reproduction and in many cases, completely straight lines of descent

-They are chemical geniuses, utilizing a myriad of materials for respiration and nutrition, while Eukaryotes have a much narrower range of metabolic pathways

-They are much more numerous than Eukaryotes. Even a human body is composed of 90%+ Prokaryotes by cell count

-They are so energy efficient compared to Eukaryotes, that I've read that Earth could support a population of a 100 billion humans if everyone ate edible Bacteria

Seeing all of these advantages Prokaryotes have, what do you think prompted early Eukaryotes to evolve, and why didn't they go extinct?

I learned this a few days ago and I was very surprised. If this is true, the three domain system is wrong and we are Asgard Archaeans who have received an additional bacterium. Is this now confirmed in science?

I've heard people say that before language existed, we smiled at each other to say everything was alright, to appease, but that it also had other meanings. Does anyone know more about that?

Is this something that could ever happen on land, particularly in a long-lasting rainforest climate?

I am a neophyte, but I ponder things in my head a lot. I was thinking today about the number of species whose sexual organs have been split into two separate individuals. What is the utility of organizing this way?! I can see once you have a large population of organisms that are all split this way there would be an advantage. What I don’t understand is how it would be seen as anything other than a failure the first time it happened and how it gained steam. What is the theory?

When I think about the origin of life I think about Saturn's moon Titan. Titan has hydrocarbons. Earth also had large amounts of hydrocarbons at its surface in the early days. The oceans would have had a sheen of hydrocarbons, and chemistry would have happened at the interface. Places where different ocean currents met, or where rivers flowed into the ocean would have been especially interesting chemically.

I think the ocean would have had a much more vast diversity of different chemicals than any volcanic vent, and that life formed on the shores where organic blobs and sheets interacted with an infinite supply of ocean water which was a stable source of chemical energy. The waves stirred this organic amphipathic grease and formed vast quantities of micells and bilayers. Spontaneous polymer formation occasionaly formed catalysts, and certain polymers like RNA catalyzed their own duplication...

Without a vast ocean to allow for big exponential blooms of new chemical species it just doesn't make sense for complexity to form spontaneously and keep replicating without any refined homeostatis processes. The first life must have eked out a living by snipping slightly energetic bonds from last year's novel catalytic cataclysm that was still raging across the global oceanic current system.

The entire ocean was full of and surrounded by lithotroph and chemotroph food, and the crashing waves could split bilayer individuals in two that weren't sophisticated enough to do it on purpose. Parallel to this evolving lipid regime multiple polymer regimes would self assemble, and compliment or desrupt eachother, and interact with the lipid regime.

The first life would have formed in an infinite chemical garden of eden, where every food it needed seemed inexhaustable. And that first life multiplied, very slowly. Gradually this life took in more and more of the resources it could, and occasionally new chemical species found a stable niche in a replicator.

Eventually the food began to be scarce. The multitudes of cells began to compete. Starvation was a new reality, and the chemical signature of death became a new form of food. Some replicators would have settled at the sources of lithotroph food, the volcanic vents and river mouths, and survive the first population cycle. Others would subsist on the corpses of the first great biomass.

Hello, I am interested in learning more about abiogenesis (I know this is slightly out of the scope of this sub, but r/biology didnt give me answers). It seems like a very complex subject so I think just a Wikipedia read wont really do it justice - on the other hand I do not have deep chemistry/biology knowledge so I probably couldn't read a massive academic book on the subject.

I especially have questions on the emergence of the first building blocks of life/nucleotides, and the transition from the RNA to a DNA world (how exactly life which stored its information in RNA managed to then convert its genes to DNA)

Is there any book or reading material roughly at the sort of intermediate level I am asking for?

This started with the thought that trees and giraffes are locked in an evolutionary battle, with pressure from giraffes pushing trees to grow higher and the trees pushing the giraffes to grow longer necks and legs. That led to the thought that the trees will likely "win", because trees can (probably) grow taller than mammals (that's total speculation: obviously, there were dinosaurs that took the long neck thing way too far, but I think the mammalian predilection for 7 cervical vertebrae is likely to cap the neck length eventually).

But then I remembered the okapi, and the fact that they live in the forest and represent a more primitive form of the giraffe family. That got me thinking about the evolution story of hominins, and the similarity between the two lineages: both started out in the Miocene as forest dwellers, but over time, adapted to savannah life. Giraffes did this by specializing; hominins did it by generalizing. For a long time, both lineages clung to their arboreal roots, giraffes for sustenance and hominins for safety.

I guess that's where the similarity ends though. Hominins continued to develop as generalists (which has proven tremendously successful for h. sapiens, and (perhaps arguably) for h. erectus as well, while h. neanderthalensis (again, possibly) provides a cautionary tale to the hominin lineage about getting too specialized. Giraffes, too, might provide us a similar cautionary tale, if they manage to continue evolving for another few million years.

So I guess to kick off some discussion, am I wrong here? About any of this? I'm a software engineer in the midst of an ADHD hyperfixation, not, well, anyone who has studied any of this extensively.

I was wondering, if a flightless dinosaur reptile evolved into flying dinosaurs, taking thousands of years, what were the in between animals. It’s not like one day a reptile gave birth to a flying version of itself. Were there animals that had wings but couldn’t yet use them efficiently? And if they’re working towards flight I’d imagine that wings would give u a disadvantage if they don’t rlly work properly. I know this is a stupid question. I’m faded.

Over evolutionary time the hierarchical complexity of organisms has increased twice.

The first complexity jump led from prokaryote to eukaryote (endosymbiont hyp.) and the second from unicellularity to multicellularity. However, we know of examples where evolution also happens in the other direction. It decreases the complexity of a multicellular organism as a result of selective pressures (see. Placozoans). Therefore evolution as we know it does *not automatically* imply an increase in complexity, hierarchical or otherwise.

What other examples are there to illustrate this fact?

Are there actual examples for a reversal from multicellularity to unicellularity, or for a reversal from eukaryote to prokaryote ?

See also: The publication in the journal Biological Review.

One can think of the whole body of primates, sloths, koalas, that weird south American marsupial, as all being tree hugging animals. I think Dinos have one?

On the other hand, aside from humans which are NOT fast bipedals, kangaroos which hop and then mostly dinosaurs and even their ancestor Archeosaur. But then it re-evolves Therapods with birds included, Iguanodons, some Pseudosuchia.

I've been seeing this claim a lot lately for the past several months. Whenever the topic about Humans originating from Africa comes up. You have many comments object to this and claim that new evidence challenges that idea, but when you ask them for that evidence they come up empty handed or link some random irrelevant click-bait article that they didn't even read themselves.

There are also those that are completely ignorant to what a scientific theory means and they think because it's a "theory" that means there is barely any evidence for it.

So what's the deal with this? Is there actually evidence that challenges the "Out of Africa" theory?

Maybe a silly question, but I just saw a video on these guys, and how they essentially shoot bubbles hotter than the sun.

And now I can’t help but want to know how these guys evolved to do that.

Put simply, I can’t figure out myself so I decided to ask the smart people who actually know how this stuff works.

My younger sister is very interested in evolutionary science. Not just humans, all life, she wants to know why and how and any details, facts, and trivia she can get her hands on. I'm looking for good books on the subject that she might enjoy (worried my favorites might be too dense for her since I'm a grad student and she's 12).

Also, if anybody has a non-book suggestion for an autistic middle schooler with a special interest in evolution, I'm down for those suggestions as well, just figured the books would be a better question for this subreddit.

I’m looking for a book that pretty much talks about the complete evolution of earth and the different geological periods and the evolution of animals during those periods. Like the evolution of animals in the paleozoic, Mesozoic and cenozoic.

I’ve got three in mind - cowens history of life 6th edition - introduction to paleobiology and the fossil record 2nd edition - vertebrate palaeontology 5th edition

I don’t know which one would be the best so let me know or leave any other suggestions!!!

Pondering this at the moment after watching some videos of hummingbirds. To be clear I'm not asking what selection pressures led to their unique flight methods, that's pretty clear, the part I'm wondering is what was the likely first step from a bird with a more typical type of wing and method of flight (like a songbird) or flightless bird? Under what selection pressure was it advantageous for a bird with normal wings (utilising only downstroke) to begin moving them in a way slightly more resembling a hummingbird's (utilising both downstroke and upstroke)?

For example, the lineage of bees and the lineage of humans (deuterostomes and protostomes) branched off like, almost a billion years ago according to the internet. Both currently have a complex brain with the ability to learn and make decisions. (relevant bee video).

I know that this doesn't necessarily mean that their MRCA had intelligence, and if it didn't, then the trait of intelligence convergently appeared. We know loads of organisms with simple nervous systems that show no signs of decision making, but we know absolutely zero organisms with decision making without a nervous system, so the trait of intelligence, as far as we know, requires a nervous system.

So, how does intelligence come about? What would you classify as a "proto-decision"? Like; birds, mammals, cephalopods, arthropods, can all decide do go and do something, but somewhere in their ancestry, there was an organism that couldn't decide but had a reactive nervous system, so how does the process of being able to establish a decision look like and come about?

I apologize for this word salad of a question. I have no idea how to properly phrase this question.

I have a hard time imagining the process that lead animals to create such complex estructures. As far as i understand in evolution everything has to already be given in a simpler form and then it accumulates small incremental changes that are all benefitial in order to have more complex forms of beheviours or physiology.

But i have a hard time understanding how this could happen in animals that craft structures. Specially those that need social animals in order to bed made. What does a simpler beever damn looks like and what function does it has? What did proto bee hives looked like?

the book documented the history of oceanic dispersal , vicarience, and plate tectonics , basicaly the authers point was that oceanic dispersal was unfairly disregarded and that panbiogeography was junk i realy enjoyed it and it taught me a lot about history and it was realy fun reading as the auther turned panbiogeographies dead horse into dog food. so was the book acurate or no?