Going Multicellular

Big Picture Science

Science, Technology

4.5 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2024

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Imagine life without animals, trees, and fungi. The world would look very different. But while the first life was surely single-celled, we don’t know just how it evolved to multicellular organisms. Two long-term experiments hope to find out, and one has been running for more than 35 years. Hear about the moment scientists watched evolution take off in the lab, and how directed evolution was used to create a multicellular organism. Also, how single embryonic cells become humans, and what all of this says about the possibility of life on other worlds. Guests: Jeff Barrick – molecular scientist at the University of Texas at Austin where his lab oversees the Long-Term Evolution Experiment that’s been running since 1988. Will Ratcliff – an evolutionary biologist at Georgia Institute of Technology Ben Stanger – cancer researcher, professor of medicine and developmental biology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “From One Cell: A Journey into Life’s Origins and the Future of Medicine.” Joseph L. Graves – evolutionary biologist and geneticist at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and author of “A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problems.” Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake Originally aired October 9, 2023 Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.
0:05.5	Big news.
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0:19.5	I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of safeguarding sound science, evolution edition.
0:24.7	Evolution is the unifying principle of biology, yet it still breeds controversy a century
0:30.4	and a half after Charles Darwin. Join us as we meet the passionate researchers and communicators
0:36.4	who are expanding our knowledge
0:38.1	and fighting to keep good science in our schools and politics.
0:42.8	Subscribe to Safeguarding Sound Science on Apple, Spotify, Amazon,
0:47.4	or wherever you like to listen.
0:49.3	Music The world would look very different without multicellular organisms, take away the animals,
1:04.0	trees, fungi, and life on Earth might be limited to a bunch of algae floating in a pond.
1:10.0	Even seaweed would be missing because
1:12.3	it too is multicellular. But we really don't know just how multicellular organisms developed from
1:18.5	our single cell to ancestors. There's at least 50 different transitions to multicellularity
1:23.7	that occurred on Earth. But all of these known transitions happened hundreds of
1:27.8	millions of years ago. And we actually don't know that much about the early steps that allows
1:32.4	evolution to actually make them more complicated and more interesting than a simple blob of cells.
1:36.5	Now laboratory experiments are shedding light on how single cells might have evolved into organisms
	...

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