ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Multicellularity in animals: The potential for within-organism conflict.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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16 citing papers in PubMed, 41 citations in OpenAlex.
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- DNA methylation in invertebrate genomes and cell lineage plasticity.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A distributive germline restricts the spread of new mutations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.BMC biology · 2026Article
- Regeneration in fish, with special focus on killifishes.Fish physiology and biochemistry · 2025Review
- Explosive cytotoxicity of 'ruptoblasts' bridges hormonal surveillance and immune defense.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Changes of division of labour along the eusociality spectrum in termites, with comparisons to multicellularity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Metabolic Objectives and Trade-Offs: Inference and Applications.Metabolites · 2025Review
- The key role of cheaters in the persistence of cooperation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- A comparative analysis of planarian genomes reveals regulatory conservation in the face of rapid structural divergence.Nature communications · 2024Article
- The diversity of social complexity in termites.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The roles of gene duplications in the dynamics of evolutionary conflicts.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Mutational profile of the regenerative process and de novo genome assembly of the planarian Schmidtea polychroa.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Conflict-reducing innovations in development enable increased multicellular complexity.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Conflict and conflict resolution in the major transitions.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Metazoans function as individual organisms but also as "colonies" of cells whose single-celled ancestors lived and reproduced independently. Insights from evolutionary biology about multicellular group formation help us understand the behavior of cells: why they cooperate, and why cooperation sometimes breaks down. Current explanations for multicellularity focus on two aspects of development which promote cooperation and limit conflict among cells: a single-cell bottleneck, which creates organisms composed of clones, and a separation of somatic and germ cell lineages, which reduces the selective advantage of cheating. However, many obligately multicellular organisms thrive with neither, creating the potential for within-organism conflict. Here, we argue that the prevalence of such organisms throughout the Metazoa requires us to refine our preconceptions of conflict-free multicellularity. Evolutionary theory must incorporate developmental mechanisms across a broad range of organisms-such as unusual reproductive strategies, totipotency, and cell competition-while developmental biology must incorporate evolutionary principles. To facilitate this cross-disciplinary approach, we provide a conceptual overview from evolutionary biology for developmental biologists, using analogous examples in the well-studied social insects.
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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 Socratic graph.