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Hey, I appreciate it. It is hard to come into the middle of an apparently long and heated debate and try to make sense of the whole thing. The passions seem to run pretty high on all sides.

I've had some biology, probably not enough. I could probably draw a cell and only leave out a few critical items, and certainly misspell nearly every structure. I perhaps could still draw a paramecium after all these years (though I likely did not spell it correctly either). I know the major organ functions. I have a loose idea of genetics in the college freshman sense. I have a decent working knowledge of chemistry, logic, math, statistics. I have a decent feel for sugars, cellulose, and carbohydrates. I would assume amino acids must have a nitrogen group in there somewhere. Proteins, I am guessing, would be built of various combinations of amino acides, but I've never really had a need to check out their structure.

I can probably keep you alive for a while if you've been injured, but am not the guy to supply a differential diagnosis for a rash & tremor combination. I would be a good guy to call if you need someone to derive the quadratic equation on the back of a cocktail napkin, or give you a moderate game of chess.

So, in reading this over, I can be classified as a rank amateur in the field of biology, perhaps two steps above "find the cat in this picture"!

You're well beyond "rank amateur"...got the ideas, ready for details.

Here's a website that shows some undifferentiated colonial critters.
Ignore all the words you don't understand..it's the pictures that give the real message.

These are way beyond the imaginary bacteria of my first post. The important feature is the flagella (hairlike structures that stick out of a cell and move about)

Flagella can move the cell around, or they can move the surroundings toward the cell. Hunters and gatherers so to speak. Or they can help hold a group together. (there are a few more "ors" which I'll omit for now.

http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/indexmag.html?http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artmay03/branched.html

I'm looking for a website with a good picture of how we are currently connecting various forms of organisms. Then I'll go back to organizing imaginary bacteria and inventing a totally different form of colony called eukaryotes (that's your vocabulary word for today, means cells with nuclei)

Anyplace I'm not clear, redundant or going off on sidetracks let me know.