  The evolution of multicellularity was a major transition in the history of
life on earth. Conditions under which multicellularity is favored have been
studied theoretically and experimentally. But since the construction of a
multicellular organism requires multiple rounds of cell division, a natural
question is whether these cell divisions should be synchronous or not. We study
a simple population model in which there compete simple multicellular organisms
that grow either by synchronous or asynchronous cell divisions. We demonstrate
that natural selection can act differently on synchronous and asynchronous cell
division, and we offer intuition for why these phenotypes are generally not
neutral variants of each other.
