ArticleNature ecology & evolution2020
Ecological scaffolding and the evolution of individuality.
Article in Nature ecology & evolution, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- From rule-taking to rule-making chemistry: a minimal population-environment feedback model.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2026Article
- Physical encounters impose a consistency-amount trade-off on bacterial group formation in marine environments.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Direct benefits are not necessary for the evolution of multicellularity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2026Article
- Article
- Lives in a gram of soil: linking life cycle biology to soil ecology.The ISME journal · 2026Review
- Top-Down Coercive Mechanisms and the Major Transitions in Evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
- Could humans and AI become a new evolutionary individual?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Metabolically driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast.Science advances · 2025Article
- Evolutionary dynamics of nascent multicellular lineages.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Individuality Through Ecology: Rethinking the Evolution of Complex Life From an Externalist Perspective.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Stability of ecologically scaffolded traits during evolutionary transitions in individuality.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Prophage induction can facilitate the in vitro dispersal of multicellular Streptomyces structures.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Metabolically-driven flows enable exponential growth in macroscopic multicellular yeast.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Multiscale selection in spatially structured populations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Context Matters: A Response to Autzen and Okasha's Reply to Takacs and Bourrat.Biological theory · 2024Review
- Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Article
- Alternating selection for dispersal and multicellularity favors regulated life cycles.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Evolutionarily stable strategy analysis and its links to demography and genetics through invasion fitness.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
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3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evolutionary transitions in individuality are central to the emergence of biological complexity. Recent experiments provide glimpses of processes underpinning the transition from single cells to multicellular life and draw attention to the critical role of ecology. Here, we emphasize this ecological dimension and argue that its current absence from theoretical frameworks hampers development of general explanatory solutions. Using mechanistic mathematical models, we show how a minimal ecological structure comprising patchily distributed resources and between-patch dispersal can scaffold Darwinian-like properties on collectives of cells. This scaffolding causes cells to participate directly in the process of evolution by natural selection as if they were members of multicellular collectives, with collectives participating in a death-birth process arising from the interplay between the timing of dispersal events and the rate of resource use by cells. When this timescale is sufficiently long and new collectives are founded by single cells, collectives experience conditions that favour evolution of a reproductive division of labour. Together our simple model makes explicit key events in the major evolutionary transition to multicellularity. It also makes predictions concerning the life history of certain pathogens and serves as an ecological recipe for experimental realization of evolutionary transitions.
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Registered trials
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.