Is There Competition in the Test Tube Between the Differentiated Cells?

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This is true a gnome differentiation between different parts of the snowflake, then maybe a part can break off and really be different kind of organism. In our organism, you don't have single self propegules, but you have these branches that actually act kind of in the same way. And so there's a continual arms race dynamic here, where it's not good enough just to get to the bottom in ten seconds or 30 seconds. You've got to beat everyone else trying to getto the bottom in 30 seconds. It sort of sets up an expectation that sooner or later, any mutation that arises will be partitioned off into its own group,. Then you'll never have admixture

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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