The Great Oxidation Event

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The first great oxygenation event didn't really help, but once it went way up, then it became beneficial. The reason why we think that we got this nike swosh effect is not just artifacts af metabolism or some sort of short-term explanation. We actually built an evolutionary model to understand this effect better. It turns out that if you build a very simple first principles model, then you can recapitulate this behaviour and its extraordinarily robust.

We’ve talked about the very origin of life, but certain transitions along its subsequent history were incredibly important. Perhaps none more so than the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms, which made possible an incredible diversity of organisms and structures. Will Ratcliff studies the physics that constrains multicellular structures, examines the minute changes in certain yeast cells that allows them to become multicellular, and does long-term evolution experiments in which multicellularity spontaneously evolves and grows. We can’t yet create life from non-life, but we can reproduce critical evolutionary steps in the lab.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

William Ratcliff received his Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior at the University of Minnesota. He is currently Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. Among his awards are a Packard Fellowship and being named in Popular Science‘s “Brilliant 10” of 2016.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.