Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

By coincidence, the same author has wrote an article about that very recently: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/12/studies-on-slack/. In particular, see section II.

I'm still processing the article in my head, but as I understood it: it's important that all cells in your body share the same genome. For some reason, evolution in multicellular organisms can be seen as two-tier - competition between the cells, and competition between collections of cells (organism). The higher-level competition forces the individual cells to behave in fully-cooperative way; those organisms that can't enforce order within get cancer and die prematurely.

The mechanics of it seem sound, and it's a nice model for a lot of things, natural and otherwise, but I'm still confused about how such two-tiered evolution could've arisen in nature wrt. multi-cellular structures.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: