Autophagy taught us to recycle and cope with hunger

Let's imagine a few eukaryotic cells in a primitive pond. Floating freely, taking food with the apparent sole purpose of dividing and propagating their genetic information generation after generation. Now, let's suppose a period of food scarcity comes. The cells best adapted to starvation will be those that survive and can hold out until periods of abundance return. It's logical to think that these repeated situations over time will lead to the development of sophisticated mechanisms for adapting to starvation. Well, one of these mechanisms is autophagy, a process millions of years old that we only began to understand about 50 years ago.