No 2-celled life exists intermediate between one- and multi-celled
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Claim
There are no two-celled life forms intermediate between unicellular and multicellular life, demonstrating that the intermediate stage is not viable.
Source
- Brown, W., 1997, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood: 19. Two-Celled Life? [1]
Responses
- There are species of amoebae-like protists, collectively known as slime molds, that, when food is scarce, will aggregate together to form a colonial organism that is able to move like a slug, and may be either multi-nucleated or multicellular, differentiate cells, form a stalk with a spore-capsule, and then release dry spores that become more amoebae.
- There's no reason to believe that such an intermediate had to exist. The transitional state need not have been a numerical intermediate. More likely it was a functional one in which symbionts came to have stronger degrees of dependence on one another.
- Further, the existence of a transitional form at some time in the past does not entail its existence now. A trait that is adaptive at one time may not remain so for all time, as this status is dependent on the environment.
- The photosynthetic flagellate Gonium is a colonial intermediate between the free-living Chlamydomonas and the hollow ball-like colonies of Volvox, in that Gonium is a simple cluster of 2 to 32 Chlamydomonas-like cells embedded in a wad of gelatinous polysaccharides.
- Dicellular is a special case of multicellular, so this is a distinction without a difference.
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Fallacies contained in this claim
- Distinction without a difference (Dicellular is a special case of multicellular)
- Suppressed evidence (Unequivocal evidence that there really are 2-celled organisms, ala Gonium, is conveniently ignored)
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Further Reading
- Bonner, John Tyler, 2000. First Signals: The evolution of Multicellular Development, Princeton University Press.
- Cavalier-Smith, Tom, 2002. The phagotrophic origin of eukaryotes and phylogenetic classification of Protozoa. Int. J. Syst. Evol. Microbiol 52:297-354.

