How to pronounce “multicell” in English

were multicellular aliens, would they have cancer?

Now multicellularity, cells just getting together to make life easier for themselves, that has, again, emerged many, many times throughout history of life

Mitochondria made multicellular life possible. They made our bodies possible, and and we might just be a vehicle for mitochondria to kind of propagate and

But as multicellular life evolved, cells came together.

And this is why multicellular life has evolved.

If they're multicellular organisms, and if they obey the rules of evolution by natural selection, then, probably, yeah.

into complex multicellular organisms.

They're a multicellular organism, and there's no increase in mortality with hydras as time goes by.

You follow all complex multicellular life back, you get to one event, which was the creation of one eukaryotic cell.

So there are many advantages to being multicellular.

If we're going to be multicellular, if we're going to have our cells behaving in the cellular society, we have to accept

And it was this idea that multicelled organisms actually incorporated bacteria into them.

If the problem is that complex multicellular life, eukaryotic cells and stuff, are very, very rare in the galaxy,

So if you're a meta multicellular organism, like us, your enemy, in general, is not a lion, a tiger, or a bear.

And it's one of the interesting things about multicellular organisms is we know when to stop.

So this idea that cancer is the price we pay for multicellularity.

It would be another 2 and 1/2 billion years before multicelled organisms.

here uh the dinosaurs ruled around here uh all the multicellular life that

on Earth. Complex multicellularity, where you get organisms with tissues-- and animals would be the best example

to today, from the beginning of multicellular life to the point today, but it's been punctuated by these mass extinctions.

We've got some biologists in the group that are primarily interested in multicellularity.

Now, animals are one branch of multicellular life.

perhaps. And in that transition to multicellular life, the sensing and signaling that cells had been doing as whole organisms in the unicellular

The trick is to get to complex, multicellular life.

on Earth. And you get multicellularity within a billion, a billion and a half years of the first sign of life

And there have been five of these events already since life evolved on Earth-- since multicellular life evolved, I should say.

That being said, when you're dealing with a multicellular organism, you've got two problems.

So where I kind of really start from in the book is I start from the origins of multicellular life, 4 billion years ago.

Given that we find cancer across all of life, all of multicellular life, we can find evidence of cancer emerging, if there

So over the last 600 or so million years, through the period of multicellular life on Earth, the diversity of life has increased from that time period

So it wasn't until between 700 and 800 million years ago that what we would now call complicated multicellular

And so there are these creatures that don't experience aging, but multicellular organisms-- they tend to, but it does beg the question,

creative throughout evolution to go from one step of complexity to another, from monocellular to multicellular, to different kinds of symbiosis between animals,

which for a multi-celled organism simply meant to survive. From those multicellular organisms grew more complex organisms. We have nervous systems, still all precognitive before any thinking. Species felt their way forward.

and all little organelles and chloroplasts in plants and all those things, which form all multicellular living things on the planet.

Those cells, which seem to be prerequisite for complex multicellular life, evolved once on this planet as far as we can tell.

One thing evolution did was to provide a kind of cognitive glue, which we can also talk about, that ties them together into a multicellular system.

animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons, eye precursor, so formation of the eye, complex multicellularity.

And eukaryotic cells turned out to be phenomenally powerful, and phenomenally adaptable, and, in a sense, the stepping stone to creating multicellular organisms.

And the thing that I realized, as I was writing the book, that the reason why is because cancer is the price of multicellularity.

And it's a new way of thinking about cancer as, almost, the inevitable emergent property of multicellular tissue.

And ultimately, the thing we can blame is that we are incredibly, wonderfully evolved multicellular beings.

And were any challenge-- I guess, was any challenges for the physicality, going from a single celled organism to multicellular?

And I ask the question, what if strong AI bears the same relationship to today's narrow AI as multicellular life does to its single-celled forebears?

And for about 4 billion years, from when we were single-cell organisms until now, multicellular organisms, we've evolved by one set of rules.

happening. To me it seems like, I mean, if you look at, for instance, the evolution of multicellular life, right? This was a tremendous win for life in general, but for single cells--

three billion years. It's only in the last billion years or so, perhaps a little bit less, that multicellular life has existed on this planet,

I want to know how likely it is that given microbes on a planet, those microbes will get together into complex multicellular things.