Originally Posted by Crowbar
Sorry, but from a systems perspective, these processes simply replace the domain of the environment of the single-celled organism.
Still, the genetic code in a multicelled organism is programmed for the development of a very specialized and highly complex morphological process, an extra complexity that is not present/encoded in the unicellular organism, even though the latter might form colonies. Such processes are extra complexity levels that were encoded in the one original cell of the multicellular organism. Extra complexity vs. less complexity. So my point stands: even though it is not trivial at all to compare the levels of complexity between a unicellular and a single fertilized egg of a multicellular organism, the results of what such cells produce suggests that they certainly might be complexities of different orders of magnitude, rather than the same.