Rosslenbroich, Bernd. “The Major Transitions in Early Evolution.” In On the Origin of Autonomy , pp. 41-67. Springer, Cham, 2014.
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Features of autonomy and robustness in early evolution are brought into focus in this chapter. First, the rudimentary and vulnerable autonomy in prokaryotes is described. How the capacity for self-regulation and self-adjustment increased during the transitions to the eukaryotic cell and to multicellularity is then characterized. In the second part, some early metazoans are compared concerning their organizational closure, showing that metazoan autonomy evolved in successive steps.