Here's another cool evolutionary tweak -mitochondria.
They are essentially enslaved purple bacteria, the best theory is they escaped into the cell from a broken phagosome, and then at some point they had some membrane proteins inserted into them, that allowed them to live symbiotically with(in) the cell.
The mitochondrion is a "symbiont", it generates and compartmentalizes energy for the cell, but it's its own life form, with its own DNA and its own reproductive cycle. So, inside every cell, there are actually multiple life forms, and one way you get "discontinuous jumps" in evolution is when two or more life forms interact during their reproductive cycles.
There are "good" viruses too, that are also symbionts. In fact, if you kill all the viruses the brain stops working, you can't remember anything anymore. (There is a "virus-like" mechanism in the brain that shares bits of RNA between neighboring cells).
A human "being" is actually an amalgam of human, bacterial, and viral life. Evolution has incorporated different kinds of life along the way, to do specific jobs. Energy management is one of them, information processing is another.
They are essentially enslaved purple bacteria, the best theory is they escaped into the cell from a broken phagosome, and then at some point they had some membrane proteins inserted into them, that allowed them to live symbiotically with(in) the cell.
The mitochondrion is a "symbiont", it generates and compartmentalizes energy for the cell, but it's its own life form, with its own DNA and its own reproductive cycle. So, inside every cell, there are actually multiple life forms, and one way you get "discontinuous jumps" in evolution is when two or more life forms interact during their reproductive cycles.
There are "good" viruses too, that are also symbionts. In fact, if you kill all the viruses the brain stops working, you can't remember anything anymore. (There is a "virus-like" mechanism in the brain that shares bits of RNA between neighboring cells).
A human "being" is actually an amalgam of human, bacterial, and viral life. Evolution has incorporated different kinds of life along the way, to do specific jobs. Energy management is one of them, information processing is another.