Re: The egg or the chicken

On 11/8/2024 1:44 AM, Ernest Major wrote:

On 07/11/2024 20:41, RonO wrote:

On 11/7/2024 10:43 AM, Bob Casanova wrote:

On Thu, 7 Nov 2024 09:39:14 -0600, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by RonO <rokimoto557@gmail.com>:
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241106132114.htm
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This news article claims that nature could create eggs long before it
invented chickens.
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There is a single celled eukaryote (Chromosphaera perkensii) that
branched off from animal cellular life forms a billion years ago before
protists evolved.  It is a single celled organism that can form balls of
two types of cells that look like early stage embryos, and it exists in
these balls for about 1/3 of it's life cycle.
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The article claims that single celled animals could form embryo like
cellular complexes long before multicellular life forms evolved, but the
most their work indicates is that the genes that could be used to evolve
multicellular life and future embryos may have existed that could allow
the evolution of the convergent trait in two divergent lineages
separated by half a billion years of evolution.  It branched off from
the lineage that led to multicellular life a billion years ago and some
time during it's evolution since splitting off it evolved the means to
form these balls of cells.  A half a billion years after the divergence
the lineage of multicellular animals evolved something similar.  For all
we know the lineage of multicellular animals evolved embryos half a
billion years ago, and the independent lineage of C. perkensii evolved
their ability more recently, unless they have evidence that these embryo
like structures existed a billion years ago.
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You don't have to go that far back; even if we have no
fossilized eggs of fish or amphibians (due to the lack of
hard shells) we do have fossilized reptile and dino eggs,
which preceded chickens (or any other avians) by quite a few
million years. So I'd rate the article as "interesting, but
nothing really new regarding the old question".

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They are claiming that they have what preceded eggs.  This is before sperm and egg produced embryos.
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Ron Okimoto
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 A preprint of the paper is available on BioXRiv. What the paper actually claims is that the Chromosphaera division phase parallels early embryonic development.
 They report a life cycle of ~65 hours of a growth phase of single cells, followed by a division phase of ~30 hours during which the cell divides repeatedly, resulting in hundreds of cells, without a further increase in volume. On termination of the division phase the cells are released presumably to start the next growth phase. They report that the released cells are of 2 or 3 types - mitotic (aflagellate, capable of division) and flagellate/amoeboflagellate. They don't go on to investigate the roles of the different cell types in the life cycle.
 Different forms of borderline multicellularity occur in several other holozoan groups. I'd doubt that the state in Chromosphaera represents the ancestral state, though they do make a case for the involvement of the same genes in animals and Chromosphaera. (It's been known for some time that the basis of the tool kit for animal multicellularity is present in other holozoans.)
 They don't make much of this, but the Chromosphaera life cycle could still be ancient, which casts doubt on the animal interpretation of the Doushanto "embryos".
 

They do not know when the lifecycle evolved.  All they can claim is that this lineage was able to evolve something similar to animal embryos, but that they diverged from the animal lineage before protists had evolved. The common ancestor may have had the genes that could evolve into a system that included embryo development.  The protists would have had to have lost the ability if the common ancestor had it.
Ron Okimoto
Ron Okimoto
Ron Okimoto