"But if the thousands of Dictyostelium in a stamp-size plot of soil should
eat their surroundings clean, they do something exceptional, and this is
what Bonner had captured on film."
"Rather than crawling around randomly, the amoebas start streaming toward
one another in inwardly pulsing ripples. As many as 100,000 converge in a
swirling mound. And then, remarkably, the mound itself begins to act as if
it were the organism. It streches out into a bullet-shaped slug the size
of a sand grain and begins to move. It slithers up toward the surface of
the soil, probes specks of dirt, and turns around when it hits a dead end.
Its movements are slow--it would need a day to travel an inche--but in a
stop-action film, such as the one that Bonner showed Einstein in his
darkened office, the deliberatness of the movements eerily evoke an it
rather than a they." ~M. J. and R. L. Blanton, "The Slime Alternative,"
Discover, Sept 1998, pp 86-93, p. 88
And when the 'organism'--the united slug of amoebas reaches the surface
they form a stalk with spores that stick up into the air. The article says:
"About 15 percent of amoebas in a Dictyostelium colony die to form the
cellulose stalk; the remainder become spores."
The spores can then attach themselves to birds feet and be carried
thousands of miles. But the interesting thing is, when it is needed, the
amoeba can act like a multicellular organism. All it would take to convert
this to a multicellular organism is for it to lose the ability to act
independently.
Some believe that this animals is intermediate between multicellular
animals and fungi; others don't agree with this saying that the
multicellularity exhibited by Dictyostelium is different than that of
multicellular animals. It is different in the ability to come together and
separate again. But this ability is what makes this an excellent model of
the evolutionary transition between multicellular animals and single
cellular animals.
"But it is also surprising them with evidence that suggests Dictyostelium
is far more closely linked to us than anyone had imagined. In case after
case, the proteins found working together in Dictyostelium are the same as
the ones doing the same tasks in multicellular organisms--and only
multicellular organisms. In some cases, only animals and Dictyostelium have
these proteins in common.
"One set of such proteins, known as STATS, are responsible for many
signals critical to development in human embryos; in our adult life they
continue to carry information in the immune cells. Last year British
researchers discovered that Dictyostelium uses STAT proteins to relay its
signals as well." ~M. J. and R. L. Blanton, "The Slime Alternative,"
Discover, Sept 1998, pp 86-93, p. 90-91
For those who don't believe in evolution, the question is, Why can't
non-evolutionary views ever anticipate the existence of such beings? In
fact they tend to say such things shouldn't exist. And if there are no
predictions to be made for either PC or special creation, how can such
views ever be tested?
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm