The Snowflakes Are the Coolest Thing You Can Do in the Lab

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The snowflakes are the result of experiments on single celled yeast to form groups. These selection experiments are kind of like selective breeding in the way we have domesticated dogs, and we've made wheat and corn from wild relatives. The fancy term now is either experimental evolution or directed evolution. And they don't really think necessarily that settling faster is a reason that things have become multicilar.

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.