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Synopsis

For a billion years, life was simple, consisting of bacteria and archaea.  Then, about 2.6 billion years ago, “something happened” that led to the more complex eukaryotic form of life, with its separated nucleus and organelles.  Many people have wondered how this transition happened; Muro et al. instead ask why.  Their answer is that evolution in prokaryotes led to more and more complex forms that required more and more extensive evolutionary “searches” for new proteins.  At some point, a second-order “phase transition” in evolutionary strategy adopting the modularity of eukaryotes and of multicellular organisms allowed for faster evolution.  We will examine their argument.