The Evolution of Multicellularity, co-edited with Peter Conlin and Will Ratcliff, has been published by CRC Press. It’s available on Amazon, but cheaper to order direct, and for the time being you can save 20% with discount code FLA22 (I don’t know how long that will last).
The goal of this book is to provide an overview of the evolution of multicellularity: the types of multicellular groups that exist, their evolutionary relationships, the processes that led to their origins and subsequent evolution, and the conceptual frameworks in which their evolution is understood. In four main sections, the contributors review the philosophical issues and theoretical approaches to understanding the evolution of multicellularity, the evolution of aggregative multicellularity, the evolution of clonal multicellularity, and the evolution of multicellular life cycles and development. While the subject is too broad to cover in a truly comprehensive way, the contributors have done an outstanding job of synthesizing the critical information on their respective topics. We hope that this book will serve as a starting point for readers interested in the evolution of multicellularity, a reference for researchers on the subject, and a jumping-off point to stimulate future research.
The publisher has put pretty strict limits on what we can share (they want to sell books, after all), so I won’t be posting a downloadable version (I don’t, in fact, have one). However, the Foreword and Chapter 1 (together) can be downloaded for free, and some of the authors posted preprints of their chapters (which the publisher allowed). I have linked to these in the table of contents below. If I learn of others, I’ll update this post.
I’m biased, of course, but I really do think the authors have done an outstanding job with their respective chapters. I hope you think so, too!