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Complex Numbers #1082204 added January 10, 2025 at 11:01am
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Cell Mates
Sometimes, I just find something I think explains something pretty well. This is one of those times. From Quanta:
While it's amusing to think of cell organization as a bunch of oppressed worker cells getting together and striking for more pay and better benefits, that's not quite what happened.
Three billion years ago, life on Earth was simple.
Ah, yes, the good old days.
Single-celled organisms ruled, and there wasn’t much to them. They were what we now call prokaryotic cells, which include modern-day bacteria and archaea, essentially sacks of loose molecular parts.
In fairness, I know a few people who are little more than sacks of loose molecular parts.
Then, one day, that wilderness of simple cells cooked up something more complex: the ancestor of all plants, animals and fungi alive today, a cell type known to us as the eukaryote.
Think of the eukaryotic cell as like those old Reese's commercials where "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" "You got peanut butter in my chocolate!"
“Eukaryotes are this bananas chimera of bacteria and archaea,” said Leigh Anne Riedman (opens a new tab), a paleontologist who studies early life at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
It took me a minute to grok that "bananas" in this case was used in its metaphorical sense of "wild and crazy." Though bananas are eukaryotic life, too.
The eukaryotes invented organization, if we use the literal definition of “organize”: to be furnished with organs.
It's not like that was directed by consciousness, but okay.
For many decades, biologists considered eukaryotes to be one of three main domains of life on Earth. Life is composed of three distinct cell types: bacteria and archaea, which are both prokaryotic cells with some key differences — for example in their cell membranes and reproductive strategies — and then there are eukaryotes, which are a much different kind of cell. Experts believed that bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes each evolved independently from a more ancient ancestor.
I know some people might be upset when science changes its mind. They want everything to be known, settled, certain. I kind of get that. But life doesn't work that way. Science correcting its own misconceptions is part of why it's awesome.
Then there's a bit in there about some researchers finding some archaea that might be like the ones that first became eukaryotes, and the whole family is named from Norse sagas, which I find amusing.
There's speculation out there that the origin of eukaryotic life is an extremely unlikely, once-in-a-planetary-lifetime process, and one that would have to take place for complex life to evolve on other planets. As we have not found even bacteria-equivalents on other planets yet, that's largely speculation. But we owe our existence to the microbial equivalent of a Reese's Cup. |
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