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This episode is brought to you by decoy and acclaimed winery in the duckhorn portfolio. Decoy has something for everyone on your holiday list. Will ratcliffe, a biologist who is one of the world's experts on exactly this transition from unicellularity to multi cellularity in the evolution of life. The idea that human beings have the ability to actually poke at the genomes of different kinds of organisms could have implications for our own lives.

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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