The Microcosmic God

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Theodore sturgeon creates microorganisms and subjects them to harsh conditions. They evolve really quickly and develop intelligence, he says. Ando: We're getting five generations a day. So you have these hundredfold expansions of population size a day. But is there some how do you deal with the fact that, even though you're doing a lot of generations, it's nothing compared to a billioneir's worth of evolution? He goes on to say we can use synthetic biology tools to bring in features that evolved over millions of years into our system.

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.

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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.

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