Calcott, Brett. “Models of Organisation and the Major Transitions.” Proceedings: Levels of Selection and Individuality in Evolution: Conceptual Issues and the Role of Artificial Life Models (2009): 5.
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Since Maynard-Smith and Szathm´ary’s 1995 book, most work on the Major Transitions has been preoccupied with solving a particular cooperation problem – explaining how cheating can be suppressed at the lower-level so a higher-level of organisation can evolve (Maynard Smith and Szathm´ary, 1995; Michod, 1999; Okasha, 2006). Though this problem is important, narrowly focusing on it has sidelined other issues about the evolution of new levels of organisation, which remain largely unexplored (Calcott, forthcoming; 2008). To address these other issues, we need to shift our attention from how cooperation can be stabilised in a population to exploring how a collective entity’s behaviour is generated by the interactions of the lower-level entities. To do this, we also need to switch tools. The problem of cooperation employed concepts and mathematical models from population genetics and evolutionary game theory. But understanding how simple interactions produce behaviour at a higher level of organisation requires concepts and models more commonly employed in multi-agent
simulations, or artificial life models.