ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
The evolution of multicellular complexity: the role of relatedness and environmental constraints.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Top-Down Coercive Mechanisms and the Major Transitions in Evolution.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2025Review
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- Harnessing Nutritional Niches to Explore Fungus-Animal Symbioses.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Testing the coordination hypothesis: incompatibilities in aggregative development of an experimentally evolved social amoeba.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Larger colony sizes favoured the evolution of more worker castes in ants.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Uncovering the hidden complexity of multicellular magnetotactic bacteria.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Conflict-reducing innovations in development enable increased multicellular complexity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Resource adaptation drives the size-complexity rule in termites.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- Is chimerism associated with cancer across the tree of life?PloS one · 2023Article
- Varied solutions to multicellularity: The biophysical and evolutionary consequences of diverse intercellular bonds.Biophysics reviews · 2022Review
- Evolutionary Morphogenesis of Sexual Fruiting Bodies in Basidiomycota: Toward a New Evo-Devo Synthesis.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2022Review
- Warm and arid regions of the world are hotspots of superorganism complexity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Why isn't each cell its own cell type? Diminishing returns of increasing cell type diversity can explain cell type allometry.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2022Article
- Why have aggregative multicellular organisms stayed simple?Current genetics · 2021Review
- The Consequences of Budding versus Binary Fission on Adaptation and Aging in Primitive Multicellularity.Genes · 2021Article
- The evolution of multicellular complexity: the role of relatedness and environmental constraints.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Interplay of mesoscale physics and agent-like behaviors in the parallel evolution of aggregative multicellularity.EvoDevo · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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Abstract
A major challenge in evolutionary biology has been to explain the variation in multicellularity across the many independently evolved multicellular lineages, from slime moulds to vertebrates. Social evolution theory has highlighted the key role of relatedness in determining multicellular complexity and obligateness; however, there is a need to extend this to a broader perspective incorporating the role of the environment. In this paper, we formally test Bonner's 1998 hypothesis that the environment is crucial in determining the course of multicellular evolution, with aggregative multicellularity evolving more frequently on land and clonal multicellularity more frequently in water. Using a combination of scaling theory and phylogenetic comparative analyses, we describe multicellular organizational complexity across 139 species spanning 14 independent transitions to multicellularity and investigate the role of the environment in determining multicellular group formation and in imposing constraints on multicellular evolution. Our results, showing that the physical environment has impacted the way in which multicellular groups form, highlight that environmental conditions might have affected the major evolutionary transition to obligate multicellularity.
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