Multicellular evolution not linear

Multicellular evolution not linear

This link to a news piece in The Scientist describes a paper in BMC Evolutionary Biology which uses sequence information to build phylogenetic trees (relatedness models) for algae that exist as single celled or simple multicellular organisms. The interesting bit is that apparently there has been the bias or assumption among evolutionary biologists that evolution increases complexity. There really isn’t a logical argument as to why that would be so, but apparently the bias was there. This paper demonstrates that some modern single celled species apparently had multicellular ancestors and that multicellularity evolved numerous times among the blue-green algae.