Volvox carteriCOURTESY OF AURORA NEDELCUPhysicists and biologists don’t usually mix, and when they do, things can get messy. But the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics (KITP) is trying to change that. For more than 30 years, this prestigious research facility, which in 2007 was rated by a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as one of America’s most influential research institutes, has been pairing the world’s brightest physicists with scholars from diverse fields in an effort to answer a wide-range of scientific questions—most recently, the evolution of multicellular life.
“The reason biologists are interested in multicellular complexity is not because of an ‘in principle’ thing,” said experimentalist extraordinaire Mike Travisano of the University of Minnesota, in a lecture he gave at the workshop. “We’re interested in it because it’s proven to be an avenue for adaptation and diversification.” Travisano then showed an image of the eukaryotic tree of life, highlighting the approximately 25 independent transitions to multicellularity. “If multicellularity was an innovation,” he said, “why did it happen 25 times? Why wasn’t it just once? If it’s so great, why didn’t we get a sweep of multicellularity from a single lineage?”
These are just some of the questions the visiting scientists at KIPT are trying to answer through a 10-week workshop on cooperation at ...
