Nothing in Biology Makes Sense: Making sense of the origins of multicellularity

Experimental evolution of multicellularity. Photo by Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!

In this week's new post at the group blog Nothing in Biology Makes Sense!, Sarah Hird discusses the recently published experimental evolution study that used laboratory yeast to tackle one of the biggest questions in reconstructing the history of life:

Some of the biggest questions in evolutionary biology deal with the origin of life. For example, if I go back one generation, I find my parents. Two generations, my grandparents. Ten generations are human beings who may or may not have looked like me. Five hundred thousand are, oh, I don’t know. Maybe a bipedal hominid? Anyway, if we continue going backward like this, we inevitably get to time zero and encounter some big-time questions that can really cause a brain to cramp up.

I promise you, if you read the whole thing, you will not experience brain cramps. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In other news, Nothing in Biology Makes Sense! has put out a call for guest contributors. If you work in biology—anything from medicine to plant breeding—and you've been thinking about giving this science blogging thing a try, send us an e-mail!  ◼