<Note: this post will compete for the NESCent Blog Contest 2012>

All life on our planet began their incredible journeys from a single ancestral cell about three billion years ago. From this common origin, they live; they reproduce; and they evolve. Some of them stick to this single-celled form till now, yet many others chose another path: shifting from unicellularity to multicellularity. It is this crucial shift that led to the emergence of those endless forms of most beautiful and most wonderful, including our own species, Homo sapiens. Yet the impact of the evolution of multicellularity is far more than just about changing the life forms, a whole new level of biological complexity is achieved through this transition: cellular differentiation, cell-cell communication and cooperation, developmental regulation, etc. In contrast to such great importance, our current knowledge about the evolution of multicellular organisms is far from satisfactory, especially in terms of “how”, probably due to the lack of information about the intermediate forms and their habitat from fossil records. The recent study of Ratcliff et al point out an alternative way to solve this long-perplexing evolutionary mystery: studying the evolution of multicellularity by experiment. Continue reading →