Placozoans, the microscopic multicellular creatures that seem to be among the simplest in the animal kingdom, move and react to their surroundings.
So according to this model, not all viruses come from deep time—that is, early in the immense arc of the earth’s history, before any multicellular life existed.
In fact, it’s something that we have in common with every multicellular organism on Earth — and a bunch of the single-celled ones, too.
Jablonka guesses that the behaviors on display in the xenobots are probably “something like the most basic self-organization of a multicellular animal-cell aggregate.”
She suspects the findings might illuminate the very origins of multicellular life.
The multicellular organism was a colony of unicellular organisms, and its life was a sum of the lives of its constituent elements.
Weismann deduces from this a radical distinction between the unicellular and the multicellular organisms.
We may also regard these articulated multicellular threads as the first sketch for the formation of tissues in the metaphyta.
The third and highest stage of individuality to which the multicellular organism attains is the stock or colony (cormus).
In the same way the real multicellular fungi (ascomycetes and basimycetes) may be traced to the tissue-forming alg.