What is it about?
The history of life on earth faced a tension between a conserved multiplicative process of gene growth and a limit on the length of proteins that was solved by a change in the way genetic regulation operated. This provided an opportunity for evolution to escape a computational limit and to explore further increases in complexity.
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Why is it important?
This new perspective of the origin of the eukaryotic cell as an example of a computational phase transition helps explaining what author Nick Lane defined as a black hole at the heart of biology. Evolutionary biologists have been puzzled by the lack of intermediate steps. It turns out that these intermediate steps could simply not be possible as they would have represented unstable solutions.
Perspectives
What I am most excited about is how this paper helps combining the contingency of evolution and the universality of physics. It has represented a very stimulating collaboration between biologists, physicists, and bioinformaticians expanded through years, a true example of slow science.
Jordi Bascompte
University of Zurich
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The emergence of eukaryotes as an evolutionary algorithmic phase transition, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2422968122.
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