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.
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
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.
here uh the dinosaurs ruled around here uh all the multicellular life that
So this idea that cancer is the price we pay for multicellularity.
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.
Now, animals are one branch of multicellular life.
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.
And there have been five of these events already since life evolved on Earth-- since multicellular life evolved, I should say.
We've got some biologists in the group that are primarily interested in multicellularity.
on Earth. And you get multicellularity within a billion, a billion and a half years of the first sign of life
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,
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.
And eukaryotic cells turned out to be phenomenally powerful, and phenomenally adaptable, and, in a sense, the stepping stone to creating multicellular organisms.
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.
To me it seems like, I mean, if you look at, for instance, the evolution of multicellular life, right?
animal intelligence, land ecosystems, endoskeletons, eye precursor, so formation of the eye, complex multicellularity.
And the thing that I realized, as I was writing the book, that the reason why is because cancer is the price of multicellularity.