Life is complex. This is true not just in a rhetorical sense but also biologically in that living things are complicated arrangements of multicellular life. So how did this complexity arise? The most common explanation given is that it is a natural outgrowth of natural selection and that once a self-replicating molecule formed, the selection pressures would be such that given sufficient time multicellular life would be an almost inevitable consequence, though the exact form it would take would depend on many contingencies. [Read more…]