There was an article about this a couple of weeks ago at PhysOrg — Random mutation, protein changes, tied to start of multicellular life, but we didn’t pay any attention to it.
A much more informative article appears today in the Register-Guard of Eugene, Oregon, home of the University of Oregon, where we read University of Oregon researcher’s paper on evolution stirs debate. The newspaper has a comments feature. Here are some excerpts from the news, with bold font added by us:
University of Oregon molecular biologist Ken Prehoda is experiencing the ups and downs of becoming a viral sensation — as in social media, not an infection. A paper on evolutionary biology he and co-authors published this month on eLifeSciences, an electronic scholarly journal, was ground-breaking enough that scientists nationally took notice — and so provocative that it became clickbait for opponents of evolutionary theory. Prehoda and UO researcher Douglas Anderson and others made a discovery that’s giving science a new avenue for exploring how all life on Earth evolved from a single-celled entity squirming in seawater.
Here’s the paper published in eLife: Evolution of an ancient protein function involved in organized multicellularity in animals. You can read it online without a subscription. Back to the newspaper article:
“How do you go from a single cell to an organized multicellular organism?” Prehoda said. “The key, really, is finding the steps.” Prehoda’s research argues that the change from single cell to multi-cell was much more easily accomplished than many scientists have thought previously. By contrast, the so-called intelligent design theory put forth by believers who say a divine entity created humans is based on the idea that organisms are so complex that they couldn’t arise from the random, step-by-step process of evolution.
So far, the creationist websites we follow haven’t talked about this. But they will. Let’s read on:
As a result, Prehoda now finds his email box stuffed with missives from unhappy anti-evolutionists. The writers’ general message is: “You say we come from cells and monkeys, but we come from God,” Prehoda said.
The eLife publication sparked an explosion of interest, with write-ups in The New York Times, The Washington Post and Discovery magazine. Readers hit the eLife link more than 30,000 times, which probably is a record for eLife, Prehoda said.
How did we miss this? Ah well, we’re on top of it now. The newspaper continues:
Prehoda’s team’s first problem was imagining how single-celled organisms could arrange themselves alongside their counterparts and establish a colony that could begin to cooperate and become complex, many-celled life forms.
Prehoda and other scientists realized that single-celled organism that propelled itself with a tail (called a flagellum) would have only one way to organize. “If you want to get together in a little sphere, and you have a tail, you can’t really stick the tail any way but out,” he said. Thus oriented, when the cells divided, they had a natural structure to follow. The tail specifies how the cells divide. In the lab, Prehoda and other paper collaborators — including some at Berkeley and Wisconsin — studied choanoflagellate, modern single-celled organisms that sometimes form colonies to pursue food.
Sounds reasonable. Then what? We’re told:
Using sophisticated methods — the bread and butter of current evolutionary research — the scientists traced the organism’s genes back through the eons to the unicellular ancestor of all animal life on the planet. They do this by computer, comparing genes — with their pairs made of A,C,G,T — and inferring the mutations that caused changes at each stage of evolution.
Finally, when they arrived at the sequence of the ancient unicellular relative of all animal life, the researchers copied the sequenced information, sent it to a laboratory in Florida, and, a few days later, a tube of clear liquid containing the DNA of an ancient molecule that hadn’t existed for hundreds of millions of years arrived.
Skipping a bit:
And, to their surprise, it took only one mutation on one gene to give single cells the ability to get into position for multicellular cooperation, Prehoda said.
One mutation! Then, voilà — multi-cellular life! No Oogity Boogity required. You can see why the creationists are upset.
Now we’re going to skip a lot. If you’re interested in the details you can click over there to read it all, and the published paper too. This final excerpt comes from near the end:
From a microbiology standpoint, Prehoda said, there’s no argument about evolution. “You can make evolution happen on a rapid time scale in the lab,” he said. “We’ve witnessed evolution. Evolution is just a fact, hands down.”
So there you are, dear reader. What will ol’ Hambo say about this? Or the Discoveroids? They can’t ignore it, so this should be fun.
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