as i had a cigarette (sorry, r!) i started thinking about strange things. like, what if embryonic development of multicellular organisms proceeded by sexual reproduction, i.e., with a dependency on meiosis? so that, like normal, two haploid gametes would join together to form a zygote, but instead of dividing by mitosis, they would spawn more haploid units (with crossing over and everything) that would themselves join together and spawn more haploid units. i mean, i suppose this is just an inefficient way of mitosis, because, while you'd get some admixture of genetic material, each cell would still have the same material, just rearranged. what would be really wild is if it didn't just involve two gametes. if it was an entire colony of gametes, if the multicellular organism was made up of a mosaic of haploid and diploid units. kind of like a nation based primarily on the family unit. ok, i'm weird.