One of my favorite papers of all time is "The chastity of amoebae: re-evaluating evidence for sex in amoeboid organisms." The title alone is enough to make it memorable, but the story inside of it has always stuck with me. The authors document the way that amoebas--so commonly imagined as asexual blobs--have actually jumped between sexual and asexual reproduction a number of times in their evolutionary history. The lesson I took from reading this paper is that evolution is not a straightforward process by which life becomes more "advanced." Evolution is a combination of randomness and advantage that means sometimes simplicity wins, and sometimes it doesn't.
I wanted to explore that idea more outside the world of amoebas, so for this episode of Tiny Matters, I talked to a scientist studying the evolution of ferns to understand more about how their own reproduction has jumped between different types of complexity, as well as to a scientist who worked to bring an ancient antibiotic back to life.
