The Evolution of Multicellularity in the Mackerel

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A little bit of complexity at the micro level is enabling much greater complexity at the mackerel level. And now you have all thes sort of madules to play with for building a multi psycho organsm, ye,. It's also kind of cool, because, in some sense, a few million years ago animals were roughly 800 million yers o, i see. Ok. So, ucariots. In the cariotic skip space, you know, you carryot arise around two billion years ago, and then roughly billion years later, you start to see the first lineages of like, bonifid ucariotic multisit organisms arising that are still persisting

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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