Found this very interesting (listened to the podcast version), and was impressed by Will Ratcliff.<p>Though such directed evolution experiments can't tell us what happened during evolution, they can give us great insight into evolutionary processes.<p>I was also surprised to learn that we think multicellularity evolved over 50 separate times, and most of those were well before animals got around to it.<p>Finally I like to dream that such research could give us insight into the type of ecosystems we'd like to design (e.g. our society and machines).