Says Fortey: It isn't necessary to be big to be a perfectly functioning, complex organism.

“机能俱全的复杂动物不一定个儿很大。

In fact, we now know, complex organisms existed at least a hundred million years before the Cambrian.

实际上，现在我们知道，复杂的生物至少在寒武纪l亿年以前已经存在。

Complex organisms represent billions of years  of evolution.

复杂的生物体代表了数十亿年的进化。

Let's imagine this guy is actually the first morph of a more complex organism.

让我们想象一下，这个家伙实际上是一个更复杂的有机体的第一个变体。

Life finally had all the ingredients that it needed to get interesting: It had eukaryotic cells, which would become the building blocks of complex organisms.

生命终于拥有了变得有趣所需的所有成分：它有真核细胞，这将成为复杂生物体的基石。

Over time, these microbes may expand into  a diverse ecosystem of complex organisms, which could look radically  different from life on our planet.

随着时间的推移，这些微生物可能会扩展到一个由复杂生物组成的多样化生态系统，这些生态系统可能看起来与我们星球上的生命截然不同。

Over the years, science fiction spread a popular myth: somewhere on the red, crater-covered surface of Mars, there are complex organisms waiting to be found.

多年来，科幻小说流传着一个流行的神话：在红色的、布满陨石坑的火星表面某处，有复杂的生物等待被发现。

Never before, though, has the whole brain of such a complex organism—spanning some 548,000 connections between 3,016 neurons in the case of the fruit-fly larva—been mapped.

不过，以前从未绘制过如此复杂生物体的整个大脑——在果蝇幼虫的情况下，跨越 3,016 个神经元之间的约 548,000 个连接。

The unusual mechanism of gene regulation in C. elegans was assumed to be a peculiarity of that organism, not relevant to humans or other more complex organisms.

秀丽隐杆线虫中不寻常的基因调控机制被认为是该生物的特性，与人类或其他更复杂的生物无关。

Depending on how you view it, there were between 13 and 25 branches of complex organisms that evolved into different types of animals, plants, fungi, algae, and bacteria.

根据您的看法，复杂生物体有 13 到 25 个分支，它们进化成不同类型的动物、植物、真菌、藻类和细菌。

It also happened to be the oldest complex multicellular organism we knew of, too – one that seemed to have multiple cell types and a 3D body plan.

它也恰好是我们所知道的最古老的复杂多细胞生物——一种似乎具有多种细胞类型和 3D 身体结构的生物。

It is that variability of protein composition which permits the division of labour and specialisation of function that have allowed complex multicellular organisms such as human beings to evolve.

正是蛋白质组成的可变性允许劳动分工和功能专门化，使复杂的多细胞生物（如人类）得以进化。

If these multicellular eukaryotes were already around 1.6 billion years ago, it’s possible that other complex organisms, like animals, may have started appearing millions of years earlier than we thought.

如果这些多细胞真核生物已经存在于大约 16 亿年前，那么其他复杂的生物体（ 例如动物） 可能比我们想象的早出现了数百万年。

And this discovery provided the basis for studying the process in more complex organisms. Since then, we’ve learned that autophagy is essential for normal cellular function in all kinds of organisms, including humans.

这一发现为在更复杂的生物体中研究这一过程提供了基础。从那时起，我们了解到自噬对于包括人类在内的各种生物体的正常细胞功能至关重要。