The year 2017 has brought one challenge after another for Darwinism, and many challenges in November dealt with the evolution of cells as we know it.New research says that the lifecycle of nascent multicellular clusters is informed by the physics of their stress.Since they aren't guided by any real biological program, accidental reproduction yields evolution into multicellular life.Weeks prior, researchers published in Nature a study of what evolutionary biologists are calling "The Internet of Cells," which is the title of the paper itself; they challenged the contemporary understanding that cells evolve independently and divide alone.Between the two publications, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography published a study that extrapolates significant information about eukaryotic evolution from a flagellate cell.

Physicists and evolutionary biologists from the team at the Georgia Institute of Technology say that genetic mutation doesn't wholly account for what drives evolution.Apparently, physics may be an equally affective (if not more so) part of that driving force.They illustrate in the paper how physical stress might contribute a lot to evolutionary progression from unicellular organisms to multicellular organisms.They conducted experiments with yeast cell clusters referred to as snowflake yeast, and they observed that the physical structures made by said clusters harbored forces that actually pushed snowflakes to evolve.

"The evolution of multicellularity is as much a matter of physics as it is biology," according to Will Ratcliff, an assistant professor of biology at Georgia Tech's Biological Sciences College.The earliest, multicellular ancestors of any living organisms grew larger but simultaneously were literally torn apart by physical stresses, presenting the conundrum of how to sustain the requisite growth for complex, multicellular evolution.

The team was able to control several factors, though, so those stresses ended up doing little more than redirecting the evolution of yeast toward larger and more resilient snowflakes. "In just eight weeks, the snowflake yeast evolved larger, more robust bodies by figuring out soft matter physics that took humans hundreds of years to learn," according to Peter Yunker, an assistant professor of physics at Georgia Tech.NASA, the National Science Foundation provided a grant for Yunker to work with Ratcliff on documenting the evolutionary process, and they noted every detail they could of the mutated snowflake yeast's physical properties.Ratcliff also received a Packard Foundation Fellowship to aid in the study.

The organizations funding the research inherently evince the significance of this study.The cell cluster they studied is far from being multicellular even in the most basic sense like that of certain algae, but the study shows what it actually takes for a unicellular organism to eventually yield a multicellular organism. "It's a journey of a thousand steps," Ratcliff explains. "The key change is for this group of cells not to evolve as a gang of single cells but as one multicellular individual." Physical forces proved most responsible for progress in that regard because the simple snowflakes lacked the complex biology to simply drive the process the way animal biology does.

Yunker remarks that "This is an amazing example of multicellular adaptation around physical constraints well before the evolution of a cellular developmental program," and that example actually scoffs in the face of the long-maintained perspective that views cells as being individuals.Scientists have practically always looked at cells as individuals because they communicate amongst one another and build things together, divvying up the workload like construction workers.The so-called Internet of Cells discussed in the Nature article further disintegrates that perspective.

Monya Baker is an editor and writer for Nature Publishing Group in San Francisco, California, and she penned the article that outlined what she calls the latest revolution in biology.In it, she writes that the revolution started when researchers found proteins engineered to manifest in specific cells seemed to also be capable of teleporting from one group of cells to an entirely separate cell group.That led biologists to discover molecular nanotubes, which seemingly transmitted genetic information while even transporting organelles from one cell to another.This was when it first began to look like cells might be less independent than originally theorized.

These nanotubes later turned out to be "interstate highways" that extend and connect cells to other cells in order to transfer material.Experts began to refer to this as intercellular trafficking, which has become a controversial concept in the scientific community because pundits don't all agree on what's being transported or how frequently this phenomenon happens.This is partly because, when nanotubes were discovered, they were quite simply difficult to observe at all.These are tubes of only 200 nm in diameter.Baker, however, proceeds to recount 2004 lab findings that illustrated "something even more radical: nanotubes in mammalian cells that seemed to move cargo such as organelles and vesicles back and forth."

Since then, researchers have been finding more and more membrane nanotubes among neurons, mesenchymal stem cells, epithelial cells, lots of different immune cells, and several cancer cells. "In 2010, Gerdes and his team reported that some tubes end in gap junctions," Baker writes.It's a big deal because this Internet of cells may very well be what facilitates the proliferation of viruses and other disease agents across tissue cells, and it similarly informs the process by which cancer cells hijack other cells.

Jan Janouškovec, lead author of a study from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, found that Ancoracysta twista, a eukaryotic microorganism, "represents a whole new lineage in the eukaryotic tree of life." In other words, it's its own species.A.twista is a flagellate some 10 micrometers long, and in studying it, Janouškovec's research team was unable to match its genetic material with those of any other eukaryotic lineages, which let them know that it was a new lineage altogether.It's also a unicellular, eukaryotic organism, which means they have the opportunity to study its evolutionary process from this point forward to gain further insight into how eukaryotic ancestors first developed mitochondria and other such organelles.

This discovery greatly muddies the waters and, perhaps, presents more questions than answers.Experts have long considered jakobids — an obscure group of eukaryotes with "gene-rich" mitochondria — to be arguably the lineage that reaches closest to the genesis of eukaryotes.Arguably the most problematic aspect is that this newly discovered lineage of A.twista has literally no relation to jakobids whatsoever.On the other hand, A.twista does have a whopping 47 protein-coded genes, and the oldest eukaryotes are theoretically supposed to possess large quantities like that.Jakobids, for example, generally carry around 60.Human beings, by comparison, have 13.