Most living things are bacteria and other types of tiny single-celled organisms.
Out on one tiny branch of the tree of life are strange, highly complex, and very large types that tower over the rest, called plants, animals, and fungi.
They discovered how to make huge colonies of cells coordinate to become parts of a larger whole. The average human contains just under 40 trillion cells, who have learned to specialise into all the parts that a person needs to live from hearts, to eyes, to neurons.
A body is the emergent phenomena when huge colonies of cells cooperate and act as a single unit. There are four major classifications - animals, plants, fungi, and protists.
Animal bodies, like all bodies, consist of a variety of systems that supports the health and nutrition of the interior cells - like the digestive, respiratory, and immune systems, as well as the structural support and movement, i.e. the muscular-skeletal, the reproductive, senses including eyes, ears, taste, smell, and touch, for interior communication i.e. the nervous system, and finally a brain to regulate the internal environment and allow the muscular-skeletal system to respond to the outside one.
The array of variations produced from these basic systems is dizzying. This arrangement, which was largely finished by the time of the Anomalocaris after the Cambrian explosion, is still the basis of all animal life to this day, is likely to be far into the future.
These two animals are made from the same blueprint.
Plants follow a different pattern. Instead of a digestive system with intestines to break down complex foods and arteries and veins to distribute it, they have root systems that extend far into their environment to absorb their much simpler nutrition and their water directly from the ground, and phloem, the plant equivalent of arteries, to distribute it. The nutrients are used to construct elaborate fans that act as nets for sunlight and carbon dioxide, and to grow new structures to reach for ever more material. With the basics covered, plants create an endless number of creative ways of fertilising themselves with the genes of other successful individuals, and of distributing the next generation of seeds to ever more distant locations.
In areas where nutrition, water, and sunlight are abundant, great jungles grow, densely packed with all varieties of vegetation in fierce competition with each other, vying to tower over, smother, poison, or outgrow each other. In areas where one or more necessities are lacking, plant grown is sparser and hardier, often with built in structural defences like spines to protect its hard-won material. See biomes.
Fungi [I need to learn more about fungi]
Once life became multicellular, an entirely new era of rapid speed and size has begun, like an arms race that has never stopped ever since.
"You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop."
- Rumi
- Alternative: "You are not a drop in the universe. You are the whole universe in a drop."
Capillary action.
- Image. Used to X. Also used outside the body to....
Osmosis.
- Image. Used to X. Also used outside the body to...
