[eleminatus]

Dear forum,

I was recently challenged, by a creationist, to provide evidence or scientific papers, on how multi-cellular life evolved from a single cell. He also asked for some evidence on the morphology of the first vertebrae. These two topics sound interesting, so If someone could provide some explanations, references or links, containing some answers, I would really appreciate it.

Thank you!

[CharonY]

Regarding early multicellular life, one can look at bacteria that exhibit multicellular life styles (e.g. Myxobacteria). Another textbook example for eukaryotic cells is Volvox. Also note that the in principle eukaryotic cells could be considered kind of multicellular as they most likely arose from associations of Archaea and Bacteria. However, this is not part of the common use of the term.

[granpa]

multicellular organisms probably evolved from multi-nucleate cells like ciliates

read up on paramecium


the key difference between vertebrates, arthropods, and molluscs originally was the way they moved

vertebrates wriggled
arthropods walked
molluscs slid


vertebrates then passed through a weird phase as echinoderms before finally developing backbones

This post has been edited by granpa: 10 January 2012 - 02:32 AM

[questionposter]

How about the mere fact that we have all known living things on this planet have the same base pairs to build DNA as single celled organisms and we even some of the exact same DNA as many single celled organisms.

This post has been edited by questionposter: 10 January 2012 - 02:44 AM