ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2024
A nonadaptive explanation for macroevolutionary patterns in the evolution of complex multicellularity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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11 citing papers in PubMed, 24 citations in OpenAlex.
- Review
- The bacterial march toward symbiosis: on-ramps and off-ramps.Trends in microbiology · 2026Review
- Structural Mutations Set an Equilibrium Noncoding Genome Fraction.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Tissue-like multicellular development triggered by mechanical compression in archaea.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Resolving spatiotemporal dynamics in bacterial multicellular populations: approaches and challenges.Microbiology and molecular biology reviews : MMBR · 2025Review
- Human deleterious mutation rate slows adaptation and implies high fitness variance.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Genome Streamlining: Effect of Mutation Rate and Population Size on Genome Size Reduction.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Male-mediated early maturation unlikely to evolve via adaptive evolution.Animal behaviour · 2024Article
- Physical constraints during Snowball Earth drive the evolution of multicellularity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Cancer to Cataracts: The Mechanistic Impact of Aldo-Keto Reductases in Chronic Diseases.The Yale journal of biology and medicine · 2024Review
- Nonadaptive onset of complex multicellularity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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Abstract
"Complex multicellularity," conventionally defined as large organisms with many specialized cell types, has evolved five times independently in eukaryotes, but never within prokaryotes. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, most of which posit that eukaryotes evolved key traits (e.g., dynamic cytoskeletons, alternative mechanisms of gene regulation, or subcellular compartments) which were a necessary prerequisite for the evolution of complex multicellularity. Here, we propose an alternative, nonadaptive hypothesis for this broad macroevolutionary pattern. By binning cells into groups with finite genetic bottlenecks between generations, the evolution of multicellularity greatly reduces the effective population size (
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