One of Evolution’s Biggest Moments Was Re-created in a Year
A unique experiment shows how multicellular organisms might have evolved from single-celled ancestors.
All the living things that we can see evolved from those that we can’t. Every human, bird, tree, and flower can trace its ancestry across a few billion years back to microscopic, single-celled organisms such as bacteria. That change from micro to macro, from one cell to many, was one of the most pivotal evolutionary journeys in Earth’s history. It is also among the hardest to imagine. Multicellular creatures, with their large size, complex body, and specialized tissues and organs, are so much more complicated than single-celled ones that it seems impossibly hard for the latter to turn.
