Any multicellular（多细胞的） animal, from a blue whale to a human being, poses a special difficulty for the theory of evolution. Most of the cells in its body will die without reproducing, and only a privileged few will pass their genes² to the next generation. How could the extreme degree of cooperation multicellular existence requires ever evolve? Why aren't all creatures unicellular（单细胞的） individualists determined³ to pass on their own genes?

Joan Strassmann, PhD, and David Queller⁴, PhD, a husband and wife team of evolutionary⁵ biologists at Washington University in St. Louis, provide an answer in the Dec. 16 issue of the journal Science. Experiments with amoebae（变形虫） that usually live as individuals but must also join with others to form multicellular bodies to complete their life cycles showed that cooperation depends on kinship（亲属关系） .

If amoebae occur in well-mixed cosmopolitan⁶（世界性的） groups, then cheaters will always be able to thrive by freeloading on their cooperative neighbors. But if groups derive⁷ from a single cell, cheaters will usually occur in all-cheater groups and will have no cooperators to exploit.

The only exceptions are brand new cheater mutants in all-cooperator groups, and these could pose a problem if the mutation⁸ rate is high enough and there are many cells in the group to mutate. In fact, the scientists calculated just how many times amoebae that arose from a single cell can safely divide before cooperation degenerates⁹ into a free-for-all.

The answer turns out to be 100 generations or more.

So population bottlenecks¹¹ that kill off diversity and restart the population from a single cell are powerful stabilizers of cellular¹ cooperation, the scientists conclude.

In other words our liver, blood and bone cells help our eggs and sperm¹² pass on their genes because we passed through a single-cell bottleneck¹⁰ at the moment of conception（怀孕，概念） .