Seeking a Holistic View of Early Emerging Metazoans: The Power of Modularity

Abstract

In our tour of early emerging metazoans, we have seen that a coral colony may be rooted in a given place, but it is never lonely. There are symbiotic algae and bacteria living in, on, and near it. We also have seen that arranging a simple organism as a metaorganism of several self-coordinating parts can confer fitness and help to sustain periods of changing environmental conditions. We even came to the point to accept that life is fundamental multi-organismal. And we have seen some of the ways holobionts become fragile and break.

The time has come to replace the purely reductionist “eyes-down” molecular perspective with a new and genuinely holistic, eyes-up, view of the living world, one whose primary focus is on evolution, emergence, and biology’s innate complexityCarl R Woese (2004)