Before this it was ATP synthase - the tiny turbines that power every cell - that made my draw metaphorically drop
https://www.teachertube.com/mobile/video/atp-synthase-a-mole...
It's easy to think of in-between steps for any post-cellular-life step in the evolutionary process that led to intelligent life but if you have no self-replication you can't have evolution. Most likely at the start proteins just floated around freely in water and did various random things, most of them not really useful. Every now and then some, by chance, some protein would do something useful. Now earth is big and before life, proteins could float around freely without being repurposed by bacteria or other organisms as building material.
But the best protein that's the result of random processes isn't helpful without the ability to clone it in some way. Proteinbiosynthesis [1] is an extremely complex process that involves multiple substeps each needing complex proteins of their own to facilitate it. It also needs an ample supply of ATP that has to come from somewhere and not be wasted by "useless" proteins.
The most simple cell that we can build today has 531 thousand basepairs [2].
Paper linked at the bottom: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02742-3
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128251-300-first-li...
Apologies, can’t find the original article.
You’ll come away fighting off the idea that it’s a sentient adversary with a much better understanding of biology than our own. The complexity of the environment it operates in is already astonishing, and then number of tactical mechanisms it employs to thrive in a healthy body seems one tick shy of statistically impossible to stachastically occur.
Hope that helps
You're a gift to horror/sci fi writers.
When you get cancer you encounter cells that through natural selection developed to beat your immune system so they've already essentially discovered every trick in the book and when you attack them the cells that survive are those who wrote a new book to do so.
Things like tumor escape mechanisms aren't sentient they are just random things that cancer cells attempt and you only see the outcome of those that worked.
Basically a cancer cell might start shouting "yo bro you should totally try this..." and other cells that receive the signal and capable of doing that action might just happen to try it, in fact in some case this is just how you get cancer, one cell starts yelling chug chug chug and all the other cells around it get hammered.
Fast little buggers.