Hanschen, Erik R., Dinah R. Davison, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright, and Richard E. Michod. “20 individuality and the major evolutionary transitions.” In Landscapes of collectivity in the life sciences , pp. 255-268. MIT Press, 2018.
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The hierarchy of life is the central landscape of collectivity in the living world-eusocial societies composed of multicellular organisms, multicellular organisms composed of single (eukaryotic or prokaryotic) cells, single (eukaryotic) cells composed of (prokaryotic) cells, cells composed of gene networks, and gene networks composed of replicating genes. The theory of evolutionary transitions addresses how cooperative collectives evolve into new units of evolution, that is, new kinds of evolutionary individuals. The transition between units of evolution was first discussed by Buss (1987) and Maynard Smith (1988; 1991), and then in a comprehensive and systematic way by Maynard Smith and Szathmary (1995). In this chapter, we briefly review the major transitions in evolution (MTE) framework as originally formulated (Maynard Smith 1988; 1991; Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995), recent revisions to this framework (Szathmary 2015), and the fitness-focused framework, evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETl) (Michod 1999). We also discuss criticisms of these frameworks and how they relate to other major evolutionary events that have occurred during the history of life.