Four billion years ago, Earth was a sterile rock. Today it hosts a symphony of life, from forests and coral reefs to creatures that build civilizations, all of it descended from simple chemistry interacting in a warm pond. How did we get here? In LIFE UNBOUNDED, pioneering evolutionary biologist William C. Ratcliff reveals that every great leap in life’s complexity, from the first cells to human culture, was driven by the same underlying process. As this process scaled its way up a ladder of informational complexity, each transition built the platform the next one required, from replicating chemistry to cells, from simple to complex cells, from single cells to multicellular bodies, and from organisms to societies connected by language. Ratcliff does not merely reconstruct this history from fossils and genomes. In his lab, he has spent sixteen years evolving multicellular life from scratch, watching as innovations that looked impossibly hard from the vantage of modern organisms turned out to be readily accessible to evolution. Complex life, Ratcliff argues, may be far more common in the universe than we have previously assumed. LIFE UNBOUNDED tells the sweeping story of the emergence of complex life as a single causally connected narrative, from the chemistry that first learned to copy itself to the cultural evolution transforming our species today.