Calcott, Brett, and Kim Sterelny. “A big picture of big pictures of life’s history.” The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited (2011): 15.
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In the introduction, we suggested that the single most important feature of Maynard Smith and Szathmary 's Major Transitions was its dynamic approach: The major changes are those that affect the key elements in the process of evolution itself. Even if this is right, it still does not isolate a single line of investigation about major transitions, nor a single way of understanding how and why they might occur. The chapters in this section sample a number of approaches to the major transitions. Each chapter critiques or extends the major transitions framework in some way, but not in the same way, nor with the same goal. Okasha, for example, takes the existing framework for granted, and argue that it entails a conceptual shift in the way we think of organisms. McShea and Simpson, in contrast, are skeptical that there is unity within the major transitions as they are currently laid out. Some of these different approaches reflect ambiguities within the major transitions literature itself (McShea and Simpson do a particularly good job of identifying some of these problems). But the different approaches also reveal the fertile ground that exists for integrating, assessing, and applying work done on the major transitions with other ideas, both in biology (such as evolvability) and in philosophy of science (such as unification, and the nature of explanation).