Is There a Time Scale for Evolution?

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The potential for something to evolve in a certain way is often exrt. It's often kind of unlimited, given suitable selection. Over sort of geological time scales, the things can evolve very, very, very quickly. And so am during that, you know, ontwo billion years to roughly 500 an forty million years before the present, you had an era of very, very low environmental oxygen. That actually, in some ways, changes the expectations off whether you expect to see multicyclarity or not.

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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