logoalt Hacker News

bbor11/07/20241 replyview on HN

The title is XKCD-style Nerd Sniping ;) The body of the article is about how a unicellular species formed multicellular-/animal-like groups via 'polar' division. I don't really understand what the difference between a colony of unicellular organisms and a multicellular organism is, but given the last sentence of the article, I don't think they do either:

  This discovery could also shed new light on a long-standing scientific debate concerning 600 million-year-old fossils that resemble embryos, and could challenge certain traditional conceptions of multicellularity.

Replies

marcosdumay11/08/2024

> I don't think they do either

They do know. But it's not a binary phenomenon, and people don't all agree where to place the line.