Clarke, Ellen. “Origins of evolutionary transitions.” Journal of biosciences 39, no. 2 (2014): 303-317.
URL1 URL2
An ‘evolutionary transition in individuality’ or ‘major transition’ is a transformation in the hierarchical level at which natural selection operates on a population. In this article I give an abstract (i.e. level-neutral and substrate-neutral) articulation of the transition process in order to precisely understand how such processes can happen, especially how they can get started.