How Did Life Level Up?

Each week Quanta Magazine explains one of the most important ideas driving modern research. To celebrate the first episode of a new season of Quanta’s podcast, “The Joy of Why,” featuring multicellularity researcher Will Ratcliff, we are reissuing staff writer Yasemin Saplakoglu’s August 2024 edition that explores the origins of multicellular life.

For most of the history of life, which began roughly 3.9 billion years ago, there was only one way to be alive: as a lone cell. The first life forms were, in their entirety, single, clearly defined microscopic units that reproduced by dividing into two new cells, each of which went on its way. Life stayed that way for billions of years. But then some of these cells started to cooperate. They transitioned from solo existence into group life. When one cell became two and then more, they remained together and eventually came to function as a distinct kind of living assemblage: a multicellular organism.

Despite the ongoing success of single-celled life, multicellularity has proved to be a remarkably successful adaptation. Life invented it not once, but at least 20 times. Independent evolutionary events resulted in today’s multicellular plants, fungi and animals. Crucially, it allows for a division of labor: Within a single organism, cells fill specific roles to the exclusion of others. Our bodies, for example, are made up of trillions of cells with different identities and jobs. Immune cells fight invaders. Nerve cells help us move, feel and think. Heart cells pump blood around the body.

By divvying up jobs among cells, multicellular organisms could grow both larger and more complex, and develop new ways of living. But multicellularity comes at a cost: Survival depends on the functioning of an interconnected system with high energy demands in which the deaths of some cells can kill the rest, too.

How multicellularity evolved is one of biology’s great mysteries. The timelines are murky. So are the reasons. And fossil evidence from most of the history of life simply doesn’t exist. The fossil record we have suggests that multicellular life started to become more common around 600 million years ago. But other evidence suggests that very simple multicellular organisms may have been around a billion years before that.

This uncertainty hasn’t deterred scientists who want to trace the origins and history of complex life. Some search for fossils of tiny organisms or even molecules, while others try to coax multicellular strategies out of single-celled organisms in the lab. Theories abound, and most don’t fit together. But given that multicellularity evolved so many times, we don’t need to limit ourselves to a single explanation. Each new study and thought experiment gets us closer to understanding a critical evolutionary moment that made us possible.

What’s New and Noteworthy

At the Georgia Institute of Technology, Will Ratcliff is probing multicellularity in modern organisms. In the first episode of a new season of Quanta’s podcast The Joy of Why, Ratcliff dives into the mysteries of multicellularity and his lab experiments that probe how “dumb clumps of cells can evolve into increasingly complex multicellular organisms,” he said. “This is one of the biggest knowledge gaps in evolutionary biology.”

His work explores these ideas from multiple angles. In his Multicellularity Long-Term Evolution Experiment, Ratcliff grows single-celled yeast on 10,000-generation timescales to evolve new forms of multicellularity. In 2021, he published a major breakthrough showing that in only two years, the yeast grew into multicellular snowflakes big enough to be seen with the naked eye. Ratcliff also takes a theoretical approach. Recently he used a computational model to figure out why prokaryotic cells such as bacteria — which, unlike our eukaryotic cells, lack a nucleus and organelles — never evolved their own version of multicellularity.

The physics of frigid seawater hundreds of millions of years ago may be another player in the evolution of animal multicellularity, Veronique Greenwood reported for Quanta last July. Cold water, such as the water on Earth when the planet was blanketed in ice around 700 million years ago, is more viscous and therefore more difficult for single-celled organisms to swim through. In an experiment, the paleobiologist Carl Simpson of the University of Colorado, Boulder saw swimming, single-celled algae begin to behave collectively across many generations as they traversed increasingly viscous gels in petri dishes, simulating conditions that could have given rise to at least one form of multicellularity.

Many scientists assume that the first multicellular organisms started out as collectives of identical cells before they began to specialize. But recent evidence suggests that ancient single-celled creatures were already surprisingly complex. They carried the potential to specialize all along, differentiating into novel forms to perform certain tasks before reverting to a standard form — similar to our own stem cells — as Jordana Cepelewicz reported for Quanta in 2019. Those findings suggest that specialization might have been in place well before multicellularity made it more permanent.

 Around the Web

• Last year, Science reported on microscopic multicellular fossils discovered in northern China that date to 1.63 billion years ago, suggesting that multicellularity may have evolved much earlier than researchers thought.
• In a tight three-minute video, Steven Plotkin, a biophysicist at the University of British Columbia, summarizes how animals might have become multicellular and speculates about what the first animal may have been like.
• In an opinion piece published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, authors from France and Germany argue that we need a better definition for “multicellularity” — the term is used in different ways among scientists — to meaningfully deliberate about how it evolved.

Listen to "The Joy of Why"

How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create modern physics? These are just a few of the big and bold questions that will be explored in the latest season of Quanta’s interview podcast, "The Joy of Why", released every other Thursday. Every week, mathematician Steven Strogatz and astrophysicist Janna Levin take turns interviewing scientists and mathematicians about their work.

In the first episode of Season 4, Will Ratcliff discusses his ideas of “how multicellular organisms evolve from scratch,” — or, in other words, “how they can co-opt basic physics and bootstrap their way to becoming organisms.”

Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.