Witting, Lars. “The major evolutionary transitions as a deterministically unfolding process.” In Sixth Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology . 1997.
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During evolution on Earth there has been a directional change where simple self-replicators
have evolved into large multi-cellular organisms with high metabolic rates and complex behavioural interactions. Associated with this increase there has been a transition from an asomatic, non-senescing, haploid, and asexually reproducing organism to a somatic, senescing, diploid, and sexually reproducing organism. In a few special cases there have been an additional transition to two different forms of eusociality. A new theory of natural selection (Witting, 1997a) suggests that this directional increase in complexity is the evolutionary process to be expected in a stable environment. An essential component of the theory is selection by density dependent competitive interactions, a factor that is not included in classical life-history theories. It is discussed how it is possible to integrate the classical and the proposed theory to obtain a more general theory of evolution.