ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Eukaryogenesis, how special really?
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 119 citations in OpenAlex.
- The archaeal roots of eukaryotic life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Symbiosis is woman: the pioneering role of women scientists.Frontiers in plant science · 2026Review
- Physical explanations in evolutionary biology.History and philosophy of the life sciences · 2025Article
- From Ancient Philosophy to Endosymbiotic Theory: The Bacterial Origin and Key Role of Mitochondria in Immune Responses.Microorganisms · 2025Review
- A reassessment of the "hard-steps" model for the evolution of intelligent life.Science advances · 2025Review
- Reconstructing the last common ancestor of all eukaryotes.PLoS biology · 2024Review
- Review
- Group-selection via aggregative propagule-formation enables cooperative multicellularity in an individual based, spatial model.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- The Ancestral Mitotic State: Closed Orthomitosis With Intranuclear Spindles in the Syncytial Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Eco-evolutionary modelling of microbial syntrophy indicates the robustness of cross-feeding over cross-facilitation.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The role of mitochondrial energetics in the origin and diversification of eukaryotes.Nature ecology & evolution · 2022Article
- The economics of organellar gene loss and endosymbiotic gene transfer.Genome biology · 2021Article
- The Origin(s) of Cell(s): Pre-Darwinian Evolution from FUCAs to LUCA : To Carl Woese (1928-2012), for his Conceptual Breakthrough of Cellular Evolution.Journal of molecular evolution · 2021Article
- The Asgard Archaeal-Unique Contribution to Protein Families of the Eukaryotic Common Ancestor Was 0.3.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Gene Duplications Trace Mitochondria to the Onset of Eukaryote Complexity.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Article
- Archaeal Communities: The Microbial Phylogenomic Frontier.Frontiers in genetics · 2021Review
- A Significant Question in Cancer Risk and Therapy: Are Antibiotics Positive or Negative Effectors? Current Answers and Possible Alternatives.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- The Similarities between Human Mitochondria and Bacteria in the Context of Structure, Genome, and Base Excision Repair System.Molecules (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Article
- Multidomain ribosomal protein trees and the planctobacterial origin of neomura (eukaryotes, archaebacteria).Protoplasma · 2020Review
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Eukaryogenesis is widely viewed as an improbable evolutionary transition uniquely affecting the evolution of life on this planet. However, scientific and popular rhetoric extolling this event as a singularity lacks rigorous evidential and statistical support. Here, we question several of the usual claims about the specialness of eukaryogenesis, focusing on both eukaryogenesis as a process and its outcome, the eukaryotic cell. We argue in favor of four ideas. First, the criteria by which we judge eukaryogenesis to have required a genuinely unlikely series of events 2 billion years in the making are being eroded by discoveries that fill in the gaps of the prokaryote:eukaryote "discontinuity." Second, eukaryogenesis confronts evolutionary theory in ways not different from other evolutionary transitions in individuality; parallel systems can be found at several hierarchical levels. Third, identifying which of several complex cellular features confer on eukaryotes a putative richer evolutionary potential remains an area of speculation: various keys to success have been proposed and rejected over the five-decade history of research in this area. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, it is difficult and may be impossible to eliminate eukaryocentric bias from the measures by which eukaryotes as a whole are judged to have achieved greater success than prokaryotes as a whole. Overall, we question whether premises of existing theories about the uniqueness of eukaryogenesis and the greater evolutionary potential of eukaryotes have been objectively formulated and whether, despite widespread acceptance that eukaryogenesis was "special," any such notion has more than rhetorical value.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.