Chapter 7: adventures in Body building

This chapter had 3 big parts:
-1. when did bodies arise - Glaessner showed that Spriggs and Gurich's artifacts are older than thought--> artifacts were the first impressions of bodies. this dates back to the pre-cambrian period
-2. how did they arise - cells join together, connected by rivets, transmit molecules through the rivets to communicate with other cells and with this network of connection, they are able to form a body.
-3. why did they arise - the world is a predator-prey relationship. if you don't wanna be eaten, then get bigger. well, the way single-celled organisms got bigger were by joining together through the process of "communicating"; this is the foundation for which bodies are based on. however, bodies did not appear in the early years of the earth because of the lack of oxygen to support the collagen that composes a large portion of our skeleton and body. that is why, after billions of years, as the amount of oxygen increased, the number of bodies skyrocketed.

what I found to be most interesting in this chapter was how cells move together ON THEIR OWN to form a body. that's amazing haha. so on a basic level, cells already have the ability and potential to come together, to function as a group to create an individual, but the only reason they started out as single-celled microbes was purely for survival purposes: billions of cells compacted together could not survive/function together with the low amount of oxygen during the prehistoric times.

err, this wraps up what i learned from this chapter and what i found interesting. haha

-Ejay Yuan