Mitochondria
In Our Time: Science
The Degeneration of the Mitochondria
As soon as bacteria get inside another cell, then effectively the number of them is an almost decreased. You can no longer have millions and millions of them. And that process of gene loss in the mitochondria is why they ended up losing almost all their genes. Instead of having to run 4,000 genes, they've just got a few. So actually this process of degeneration gave the host cell enormous power to almost do what it wanted to swell up to become larger. It's almost an unforeseen consequence of trivial trapping in a population inside of the cells which leads to a step change in what evolution is capable of.
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