Developmental cheating and the evolutionary biology of Dictyostelium and Myxococcus.

Micro-organisms, whether the prokaryotic Myxococcus or the eukaryotic amoeba Dictyostelium, can achieve an impressive level of multicellular cooperativity and it is revealing to ask how this came to be and how it differs from the cooperativity found in animal development. This is not a sterile exercise that begins and ends with speculation – there is a usefulness, a utility to evolutionary theory, particularly for microbiologists.