Such materials cannot respond to environmental variation by different their allocation of resources to reproduction; hence they may be intrinsically more predictable than reproductively-competent cells. can arise if non-reproductive somatic cells protect their reproductive parents from environmental lethality. We discuss how a somatic body can be interpreted like a Markov blanket around one or more reproductive cells, and how the transition to somatic multicellularity can be represented like a transition from exposure of reproductive cells to a high-uncertainty environment to their safety from environmental uncertainty by this Markov blanket. This is, efficiently, a transition from the Markov blanket from transparency to opacity for the variational free energy of the environment. We suggest that the ability to arrest the cell cycle of child cells and redirect their source utilization from division to environmental danger amelioration is the important advancement of obligate multicellular eukaryotes, the nervous system developed to exercise this control over long distances, and that cancer is an escape by somatic cells from your control of reproductive cells. Our quantitative model illustrates the evolutionary dynamics of this system, provides a novel hypothesis for the origin of multicellular animal bodies, and suggests a fundamental link between the architectures of complex organisms and info processing in proto-cognitive cellular providers. of the cell it occupies, multiplied from the safety it receives from neighboring somatic, i.e. non-reproductive cells, if any. The level of reproductive resources for stem cells in the environment is definitely fixed by a parameter establishing. The local source level cycles, i.e. at =?of the cells divide on each cycle, we can write: steps the availability of resources for reproduction in the environment, with =?0 being starvation conditions allowing human population maintenance only and =?1 being adequate resources for (in practice) unlimited growth. actions the lethality of the environment, with =?0 becoming completely benign 3-Methyluridine and =?1 being complete 3-Methyluridine lethality for the population in question. actions the effectiveness with which available resources are employed for reproduction by 3-Methyluridine a given cell, with ?=?0 being Mouse monoclonal to V5 Tag minimal and ?=?1 maximal effectiveness. measures the degree to which dividing cells are exposed to the environment, with ?=?0 complete protection from the environment and ?=?1 total exposure. Maximum human population growth is clearly accomplished when =??=?1 and either =?0 or ?=?0. For self-employed, free-living cells, we can collection ?=??=?1, i.e. the cells employ all available resources for reproduction and are fully exposed 3-Methyluridine to the environment. In this case, increasing the environmental lethality causes human population collapse as demonstrated in Number 1, with populations in resource-poor environments (i.e. 3-Methyluridine secreting small-molecule morphogens [37,38]. Here we suggest that obligate multicellular organisms adopt a very similar strategy, in which reproductive cells actively induce cell-cycle arrest and differentiation by cells dedicated to safety against the environment. The key difference between obligate and facultative multicellular strategies is definitely that in obligate multicellular.