Thanks for the feedback, the examples you cited are really cool. I didn’t know about akinetes but I’m reading more about them now. For the general point of the article, they might actually be too good examples of multicellularity: there is a pretty strong case that these are multicellular organism by the usual definition. What I wanted to emphasize here is that, even for species like E. coli that are most definitely not multicellular, we can still force ourselves to look at it through a multicellular lens and find interesting things. I agree that it’s awkward to change the definition of a technical term as liberally as I did, so I’ll try to see if I can come up with a better phrasing.
Thanks for the feedback, the examples you cited are really cool. I didn’t know about akinetes but I’m reading more about them now. For the general point of the article, they might actually be too good examples of multicellularity: there is a pretty strong case that these are multicellular organism by the usual definition. What I wanted to emphasize here is that, even for species like E. coli that are most definitely not multicellular, we can still force ourselves to look at it through a multicellular lens and find interesting things. I agree that it’s awkward to change the definition of a technical term as liberally as I did, so I’ll try to see if I can come up with a better phrasing.