How Did Multicellular Life Evolve?
The Joy of Why
Steven Strogatz, Janna Levin and Quanta Magazine
4.9 • 577 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2025
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At first, life on Earth was simple. Cells existed, functioned and reproduced as free-living individuals. But then, something remarkable happened. Some cells joined forces, working together instead of being alone. This transition, known as multicellularity, was a pivotal event in the history of life on Earth. Multicellularity enabled greater biological complexity, which sparked an extraordinary diversity of organisms and structures.
How life evolved from unicellular to multicellular organisms remains a mystery, though evidence indicates that this may have occurred multiple times independently. To understand what could have happened, Will Ratcliff at Georgia Tech has been conducting long-term evolution experiments on yeast in which multicellularity develops and emerges spontaneously.
In this episode of The Joy of Why podcast, Ratcliff discusses what his “snowflake yeast” model could reveal about the origins of multicellularity, the surprising discoveries his team has made, and how he responds to skeptics who question his approach.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Steve Strogatz. |
| 0:06.3 | And I'm Janelle Levin. |
| 0:07.6 | And this is The Joy of Why, a podcast from Quantum Magazine exploring some of the biggest |
| 0:13.2 | unanswered questions in math and science today. |
| 0:15.7 | Hi, Jana, great to see you. |
| 0:18.2 | Hey, Steve, how you doing out there? |
| 0:20.2 | Good. Welcome. This is season four. We're back. |
| 0:23.2 | We're back. Looking forward to this. |
| 0:25.5 | Yeah, me too. This is going to be a really exciting season. And I'm so thrilled that we're doing it together. Yeah. And you're kicking it off this season. You have the first episode. Yeah, so I did. And the topic was one I had never thought about before. I wonder if you've |
| 0:39.4 | run across it. It's the question of the origin of multicellularity. Weirdly, I have thought about |
| 0:46.3 | this. You have? Well, I found it fascinating that single-celled organisms waffled for so long |
| 0:53.7 | on the earth. |
| 0:54.8 | Huh. |
| 0:55.3 | And that just nothing was happening for a very, very long time, billions of years. |
| 0:59.9 | And then something finally happened. |
| 1:01.9 | I always thought that was just remarkable. |
| 1:04.0 | But so I think of you thinking more about like black holes, space time. |
| 1:08.0 | Oh, yeah. |
| 1:08.6 | Astrophysical stuff. |
| 1:09.7 | But why are you thinking about this? Because science is fascinating. I like the science that other people are doing too. And sometimes I just want to hear about it. You know, I'm used about things that I don't plan on working on necessarily. Okay. I see. So not from some astrobiology life on other planet type. Not yet. Huh. But you make the point about waffling that single-celled critters, like we have bacteria, maybe cyanobacteria in the oceans, taking them a long time to get their act together to go multicellular. And you said you wondered why it took so long. Yeah. Right. I mean, if you ask about astrobiology, is that |
| 1:44.8 | happening on other planets? It's just taken a really long time, and they're just single-celled |
| 1:49.2 | organisms floating around out there? Right. What took so long? Yeah. And did it only happen just |
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