Origin of Multicellularity

With Paul Rainey and Richard Michod

Paul Rainey is director of the Department of Microbial Population Biology at the Max Planck Institute. Rick Michod has a lab at the University of Arizona. Both study single-celled organisms that evolve into simple multicellular forms under certain conditions. Importantly, those conditions can be manipulated in the lab. Paul’s lab studies a bacterium called Pseudomonas fluorescens that you eat on your salad, and Rick studies Chlamydomonas, a volvocine green algae whose multicellular form is known as volvox, and lives in ponds all over the world.

In his descriptions of the global human superorganism, Teilhard draws upon analogy with complex biological multicellular organisms such as ourselves. In the Anatomy of the Noosphere, he writes:

“It may be said, speaking in very general terms, that in asserting the zoological nature of the Noosphere we confirm the sociologists’ view of human institutions as organic. Once the exceptional, but fundamentally biological, nature of the collective human complex is accepted, nothing prevents us (provided we take into account the modifications which have occurred in the dimensions in which we are working) from treating as authentic organs the diverse social organisms which have gradually evolved in the course of the history of the human race. Directly Mankind, from the nature of its origin, presents itself to our experience as a true superbody, the internal connections of this body, by reason of homogeneity, can only be treated and understood as superorgans and supermembers. Thus, for example (due allowance being made for the change of scale and environment), it becomes legitimate to talk in the sphere of economics of the existence and development of a circulatory or a nutritional system applicable to Mankind as a whole.”

Can the transition to multicellularity in the simple microbial systems that Paul and Rick study provide insight into our own transition to a social-technological superorganism of sorts?

Learn more: https://humanenergy.io/paul-rainey-an...