What Is Multi Cellularity?

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In order for something to be an organism, you need to sort of have inter acting components in which there's essentially mutual adaptation and aclamp. Soat those elements are baked into what an organism is. And so i think the way to think about multicilarity is that forming a group of cells gives you a multi segular group, but it's not aMulti segular organism. That variation ieds to be at least somewhat heritable. And if you have all those things met, then your population will evolve. If multe silarity just little clumps of cells, like, we wouldn't really we be talkin by bile films. We wouldn

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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