When Did Multi Cellularity Arose?

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When did multi cellularity arise? What do we know about its origin? Yes, no, i i'm happy to be on this sort of path of understanding life's origin and the ebolution of complexity. I actually agreed with nige goldenfeld in his recent interview where he said, you know, once you have cells, who cares about elephants? To the other extent, i've made my entire career on disagree.

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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