in humans is asexual. Cells are the functional units in biology. There are roughly 10,000,000,000,000 of them in our bodies, and each of them (with rare exceptions) contains all the genetic information necessary to build an entire human being.

The vast majority of life's history on earth is dominated by single celled organisms. Life has been here by some estimates for four billion years, and huge collections of cells like humans have been here for less than a quarter of that.

Cells are enormously complicated self contained units. They are minature factories, only orders of magnitude more sophisticated than the largest car manufacturing plant. The simplest living cell has over a trillion molecules in it, and has DNA that composed over a million atoms.

Even the simplest of cells though tend to form collections. Colonies. Groupings of identical cells thriving in the same location. When conditions are good, the cells multiply and form these collectives. When conditions turn bad they turn into dormant spores.

Slime molds start off as individual mobile cells. Under specialized conditions they come together to form a large collective feeding stage where individualized cells perform specialized functions.

In one sense then humans are giant collectives: each cell an individual organism, the body a large organized body of those organisms.

Sometimes I think of each cell as a separate but roughly identical human being, and the body as a mega hotel with a population 10,000 times as large as the population of actual persons on the earth.

What is also interesting is that while there are 10,000,000,000,000 human cells in the body, there are ten times as many or 100,000,000,000,000 bacterial cells in the body. Bacterial cells are much smaller than human cells, but it is sort of interesting to think of that hotel of identical clones as also supporting a collective of little individualized guests. Sort of like rebels in a mind controlled ideal communist state