Topic: biological complexity

Will Ratcliff investigates the transition from independent cells to multicellular organisms through long-term evolution experiments. His snowflake-yeast model lets researchers watch cooperative structures emerge, test ideas about biological complexity and assess the strengths and limitations of laboratory approaches to a major evolutionary transition.

Ideas about optimization are at the core of how we approach biological complexity. Quantitative predictions about biological systems have been successfully derived from first principles in the context of efficient coding, metabolic and transport networks, evolution, reinforcement learning, and decision making, by postulating that a system has evolved to optimize some utility function under biophysical constraints. Yet as normative theories become increasingly high-dimensional and optimal solutions stop being unique, it gets progressively hard to judge whether theoretical predictions are consis