Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1957, from prokaryote + -ic. Related: Prokaryon.
Wiktionary
a. 1 Of or having the characteristics of prokaryotes, especially bacteria. 2 Of cells, lacking a nucleus.
WordNet
adj. having cells that lack membrane-bound nuclei [syn: procaryotic] [ant: eukaryotic, eukaryotic]
Usage examples of "prokaryotic".
Maybe the thoughts we generate today and flick around from mind to mind, like the jokes that turn up simultaneously at dinner parties in Hong Kong and Boston, or the sudden changes in the way we wear our hair, or all the popular love songs, are the primitive precursors of more complicated, polymerized structures that will come later, analogous to the prokaryotic cells that drifted through shallow pools in the early days of biological evolution.
These are all contingent effects of unplanned, miscegenetic encounters: the evolutionary fallout of prokaryotic sex.
It has long been established that the first eukaryotic cells came about by the union of two other more primitive types of organism, the earlier prokaryotic cell and a kind of spirochete.