Oxygen and Multisilarity

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Oxygen is very important in the sense that we really see. If you give a system oxygen, you're going to enable the evolution of larger, more complex, multisil organisms. And there's a very good physical reason for this, which is that if cells depend on having oxygen and you form a group, then you become diffusion limited,. Those internal cells don't have access to very much oxygen. So until you can invent a circulatory system, you're stuck with diffusion. Therefore, size is just directly a function of oxygen concentration. We've thought this way for a long time. This isn't something we have actually tested, though. Maybe this is a good time to

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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