this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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There seem to be many of these multicellular animals who don't feel like a singular individual animal. I was commenting on a post a few months ago about the most genetically simple multicellular animal, this thing has less base pairs than most bacteria, and it can also do this trick where disassociated cells recombine into new individuals. This creature also reproduce sexually if and only if the concentration of fellow individuals is high enough, cells will just leave the body and join a new one like for fun. It really calls into question what an individual is.
I guess it makes sense that multicellularity would be more of a spectrum than a binary condition. If life evolved into it gradually, then it would make sense to find a lot of "intermediate" evolutionary states that don't feel like they're distinctly one or the other.