Scientists Re-Create the Microbial Dance That Sparked Complex Life
Evolution was fueled by endosymbiosis, cellular alliances in which one microbe makes a permanent home inside another. For the first time, biologists made it happen in the lab.
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Slightly clickbait-y title, but super cool and important discovery!
I found the following particularly interesting:
They also learned that in pairings that work, both partners adapt to each other — a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked. It wasn’t just the bacteria adapting to a new environment; the host changed too, even in the early stages. “That is a fundamentally important question that people have ignored,” Richards said. “This opens the doors for real advances.”
I didn't see the title as clickbait ... did they recreate the circumstances of a known symbiotic relationship? Yes, with a bike pump.
But this does seem to open the door to a new area of scientific discovery, which is always cool and always comes with unforeseen risk.
Framing it as what 'sparked complex life' is what makes it slightly clickbait-y. The circumstances which involved the creation of RNA/DNA is arguably more important when we talk about what 'sparked complex life', but it's really borderline and this is an important discovery and previous gap in knowledge so I think it's excusable here.
Can life as we know it exist without DNA/RNA? I believe even the simplest forms of life have it. If by complex life they mean multicellular organisms then I think it seems pretty accurate.
What's exciting here is this is a door opening into empirically exploring what sparked complex life. It could be bacteria insinuating themselves into cells and unintentionally ending up in a symbiotic relationship, or not, or a combination of evolutionary factors. This is nonetheless new data we didn't have, and I'm always for that. Maybe it'll be ruled out, or maybe it'll create a new realm of science.
So often today, it feels like we've hit the end of science, and I'd argue that what we need to move forward are new data and forms of measurement. This feels like that.