Multicellular Life Evolves in Laboratory

[Guybrush]

I've yet to read the scientific article, but the news article is interesting.

Multicellular Life Evolves in Laboratory | Wired Science | Wired.com

An evolutionary biologist has made yeast which are normally unicellular free-floaters cooperate in permanent multicellular arrangements simply by regularly removing free floating single individuals from his breeding tanks. In other words, he simply introduced artificial selective pressure against the typical single celled arrangement (meaning the environment favours clumping) and let natural evolution do the rest.

It's such a simple experiment which basically anyone could do and the results are still quite interesting. For biologists, it confirms something we know while still shedding some new light on the hows (f.ex it didn't take very long to see results), but for many of the evolution doubters out there, this should be even more significant as it demonstrates how multicellularity can start.