Topic: evolutionary transition

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.

Over the last fifteen years, Simona Ginsburg and I developed an evolutionary approach for studying basic consciousness, suggesting that the evolution of learning drove the evolutionary transition to from non-conscious to conscious animals. I present the rationale underlying this thesis, which has led to the identification of a capacity that we call the evolutionary transition marker, which, when we find evidence of it, we have evidence that the major evolutionary transition in which we are interested has gone to completion. I then put forward our proposal that the evolutionary marker of basic