He repeatedly grew the yeast in liquid-filled tubes, shook them, and then used the cells that sank fastest to start new cultures. In 2010, Ratcliff started working with brewer’s yeast, the single-celled fungus we use to make bread and beer. He and his team managed to replicate it in his laboratory in a matter of years. But in fact, the process might have been “relatively simple,” William Ratcliff, an evolutionary biologist at Georgia Tech, told me.
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 into the former. That change from micro to macro, from one cell to many, was one of the most pivotal evolutionary journeys in Earth’s history. Every human, bird, tree, and flower can trace its ancestry across a few billion years back to microscopic, single-celled organisms such as bacteria. All the living things that we can see evolved from those that we can’t.
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