Cohort Program Blog, Interviews and Other Writing

A fundamental issue in evolutionary biology is the nature of transitions from unicellular to multicellular organisms. From the point of view of natural selection, increased fitness of even the simplest multicellular organisms relative to their unicellular ancestors is subtle, for there are both costs and…

The star-nosed mole is aptly named. Its distinctive snout consists of twenty-two tendrils ringing a pair of nostrils and, from some angles, the entire setup resembles a misshapen star. The tendrils are fleshy and look a bit like fingers and, like fingers, they have a certain “manual” dexterity. But…