How Did Multicellular Life Evolve? | PODCAST: The Joy of Why

One of the most important events in the history of life on Earth was the emergence of multicellularity. In this episode, Will Ratcliff discusses how his snowflake yeast models provide insight into what drove the transition from single-celled to multicellular organisms. S04E01 Will Ratcliff at Georgia Tech has been conducting long-term evolution experiments on yeast in which multicellularity develops and emerges spontaneously. Ratcliff's lab: https://biosciences.gatech.edu/people... “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the astrophysicist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. Listen to more episodes of Joy of Why: https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/th... ----------- Chapters: 00:00 - Steve and Janna: Welcome to Season Four 04:15 - Many Ways to Go Multicellular 11:00 - Why Go Multicellular? 14:13 - Directed Evolution 19:53 - Mutation Innovation 25:22 - Steve and Janna: What Doesn't Kill You 26:43 - Cellular Altruism 33:48 - Playing Out in Nature 36:33 - The MuLTEE-verse 42:24 - Steve and Janna: Driven by Curiosity ----------- The Joy of Why is an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation. Funding decisions by the Simons Foundation have no influence on the selection of topics, guests, or other editorial decisions in this podcast, or in Quanta Magazine. The Joy of Why is produced by PRX productions. The production team is Caitlin Faulds, Livia Brock, Genevieve Sponsler, and Merritt Jacob. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager. From Quanta Magazine, Simon Frantz and Samir Patel provided editorial guidance, with support from Matt Carlstrom, Samuel Velasco, Simone Barr, and Michael Kanyongolo. Samir Patel is Quanta's Editor in Chief. Our theme music is from APM Music. The episode art is by Peter Greenwood, and our logo is by Jaki King and Kristina Armitage. Special thanks to the Columbia Journalism School and the Cornell Broadcast Studios. --------- Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation. We focus on developments in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences. READ free math and science articles on the Quanta website: www.quantamagazine.org LEARN about the Simons Foundation: www.simonsfoundation.org FOLLOW our social channels: Instagram: quantamag Bluesky: @quantamagazine.bsky.social‬ Facebook: quantanews X: quantamagazine