About 1.2 billion years ago a new kind of cell arose. From the work of Lynn Margulis, it is now accepted that this came about through symbiotic cooperation between several kinds of bacteria. A kind of bacteria came to produce the cellular energy exchange medium, ATP. It took up residence inside a larger cell and was fed glucose to produce this standardized cellular energy. This became the mitochondrion. A similar chain of events situated a primitive photo synthesizer, probably a cyanobacterium, inside some of these cells to produce the photosynthetic algae, and all later plants. These new kinds of cells are called eukaryotes.
Corkscrew spirochetes may have become the cilia that move these larger cells. A megavirus may even have provided the first nucleus, another characteristic of these larger cells. Eukaryotic cells are about 1000 times the volume of most bacteria. Along with the nucleus, mitochondria and plasmids, they contain other organelles and a complexity that compares to a bacterium as does a teeming city to a village. Each of the new eukaryotes contains production facilities for thousands of proteins, and a constantly constructed network of molecular “roads” and molecular “trucks” that supply chemicals throughout the cell for its busy interactions. All this complex interaction implies intelligent direction or “mind”. Analysis of this complex web of simultaneous action has created a network picture called an interactome which may begin to explain the way that eucaryotic cells make decisions. The interactome is already being studied on the bacterial level.
The increase in size alone of the new eukaryotic cell increased its ability to sense its environment. This is shown by demonstrating that simply increasing the distance between our two eyes allows us as humans to estimate the distance of objects that are much further away.
Probably because the new cells were so large and their genetic material was now inside a membrane enclosed nucleus, methods had to be developed to ensure genetic mixing between cells. This behavior became sex. At the same time, this activity tended to separate sets of cells into cellular lineages that became what we now call species.
Because these species no longer shared genetic information with each other, they could not simply exchange genes in response to an environmental change. Instead they tended to compete in a new environment find out which of their separate sets of genes survived better. This is how competition was introduced as a dynamic at this new stage of life.
The beginning of these cells caused a revolution in the living system of the ocean. Life took on an unstoppable energy. The new cells created two broad kinds of cells: those that created their own food from the energy of sunlight, and others that ate both these cells and also bacteria. This is the beginning of predation. (There are both predatory and competitive bacteria, but this behavior is not rewarded in a system that shares genes easily between all participants.) Competition and predation gave the system of life an internal drive to find new environments to inhabit (like the dry land). They also caused life to invent solutions to environmental changes before they even happened: because these pressures within the system drove life to find and work with new and extreme environments. Competition and predation are therefor a powerful proxy for environmental challenge, and the solution for many environmental changes already exist in the variety of living organisms.
Instead of fragmenting or destabilizing the entity of life, these new processes, within a cooperative framework, created new negative feedback loops of control and stability. In the simplest case, if a population of prey increases, so do its predators. The reverse is also true. Thus the predator stabilizes the size of the prey population, and the reverse. These negative feedbacks have become multi-layered and cross-linked, in a complexity that defies analysis. Stability, however, increases. The re -introduction of the wolf to Yellowstone National Park is used as an example of the regulation that a top predator supplies to the whole ecosystem.