Evolution of Biological Complexity

Abstract

It is a general rule of nature that larger organisms are more complex, at least as measured by the number of distinct types of cells present. This reflects the fitness advantage conferred by a division of labor among specialized cells over homogeneous totipotency. Yet, increasing size has both costs and benefits, and the search for understanding the driving forces behind the evolution of multicellularity is becoming a very active area of research. This article presents an overview of recent experimental and theoretical work aimed at understanding this biological problem from the perspective of physics. For a class of model organisms, the Volvocine green algae, an emerging hypothesis connects the transition from organisms with totipotent cells to those with terminal germ-soma differentiation to the competition between diffusion and fluid advection created by beating flagella. A number of challenging problems in fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics, and control theory emerge when one probes the workings of the simplest multicellular organisms.